NewsTrust - Kenya - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Famine in Somalia is over, says UN

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - Feb. 03 - Exceptional harvest and food deliveries have improved conditions, but millions of people are still at risk An exceptional harvest after good rains and food deliveries by aid agencies have ended famine in Somalia, although conditions remain fragile and could worsen, the United Nations have said. The UN declared famine in two parts of southern Somalia last July and extended the famine warning in September to six out of eight regions in the country. The UN said initially 750,000 Somalis faced imminent starvation and lowered this to 250,000 by November. Six months after famine was declared, 4 million Somalis were in need of aid and the UN said the number now stood at 2.34m. "The gains are fragile and will be reversed without continued support," said Mark Bowden, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia. "There are 1.7 million people in southern Somalia still in crisis. Millions of people still need food, clean water, shelter and other assistance to survive and the situation is expected ...

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Sewing Her Way Out of Poverty

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:28:10 -0700

New York Times - Sep. 14 (Opinion) -

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Healthcare repeal would harm women around the world | Michael Williams

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Michael Williams - Feb. 09 (Opinion) - Around the world, people are fascinated by the political tussle between Democrats and Republicans over attempts to repeal the landmark US healthcare bill passed last year. Few people realise, however, that if the new Republican-dominated House of Represe

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Alice Walker and the caricatured view of Africa

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:05:58 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Sep. 15 - In what she called a conversation (which was actually the 11th annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture), Prof. Alice Walker spoke about her experiences of and in Africa. It wasn’t in that usual “Africa is a beautiful country” kind of way, but it exemplified

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Obama expands U.S. military ops in Africa

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:12:21 -0700

United Press International - Apr. 06 - NAIROBI, Kenya, April 6 (UPI) -- Amid a surge in big oil strikes in Africa and the threat of growing al-Qaida penetration in the north and east, President Barack Obama is expanding U.S. military involvement across the continent. This has given weight

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Don't give up

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:21:45 -0700

BBC News - By Lord Chris Smith - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - VIEWPOINT Climate-related controversies and the outcome of the Copenhagen summit widely regarded as a failure have left a sense of hopelessness in climate policy, says Lord Chris Smith. In this week's Green Room, he stresses the soundness of the

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The last nomads: drought drives Kenya's herders to the brink

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Peter Beaumont - Sep. 13 () - In the isolated border lands between Kenya and Somalia, families have always clung to a precarious existence. Now a decade of droughts has tested their endurance Hawa Hassan comes leading three donkeys, accompanied by two female relatives and a handful of the family?s smallest children. They have walked out of the drought-withered acacia scrub, travelling 15 miles in a day to reach the Kenyan settlement of Makutano, not far from the border with Somalia. Makutano is a sparse collection of tukuls – dome-shaped dwellings patched with cloth and tarpaulin and sections of woven-grass matting – scattered along the dirt road. Passing through a fence of piled thorn around the settlement, Hawa and the other women unload branches from the donkeys? ...

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The Importance of Free Speech Online in Iran, China, Kenya

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Mark Glaser, Kim Spencer, Scott Rosenberg, Cyrus Farivar, Danny O'Brien, - Jul. 10 (Interview) - In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images to Flickr, video to YouTube, and running commentaries on blogs and Twitter. While the Iranian government would prefer to operate under a cloud, the Interent has proven to be a key distribution medium for spreading news to the rest of the world. This month's 5Across video roundtable focused on free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya -- and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years. The discussion gave context to Iranian Internet use, its demographics and the way people there get information via satellite TV from Persian-language foreign news sources such as BBC Persian and Voice of America. Plus, we talked about how China uses psychology in making its millions of Internet users believe they are all being monitored.

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Are Kenyan runners stoking violence?

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Foreign Policy - By Preeti Aroon - Feb. 22 (Opinion) - As anyone following the sport of running knows, a sizable chunk of the world's fastest runners hail from Kenya, a country rocked by violence after a disputed December 2007 election. Now a paragraph in a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) says elite runners there may be funding, training, and commanding militias.

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Machetes and Elections

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Feb. 21 (Opinion) - The prime villain is President Mwai Kibaki, who would have been hailed as a hero if he had obeyed the will of the people in the December election. Instead, he -- and a cast of thugs around him -- appear to have stolen the election, starting a spiral of tribal violence that has killed more than 1,000 people and displaced 300,000. Mr. Kibaki's intransigence risks the collapse of his country, possibly even civil war.

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Seven Questions: What's the Matter with Kenya?

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Foreign Policy - Feb. 20 (Interview) - The seeds of the current crisis were sown long ago, but the determined weeding took place between August 2004 and December 2007. Inequality is at the heart of it. In a place like Kenya, people can express their anger over economic inequality in regional or ethnic terms when the ruling elites aren't able to give people reasonable confidence that there is (or at least will be) equal access to economic opportunity and justice. Issues that give inequality meaning--the use of violence for political purposes, genuine land grievances, conspicuously corrupt leadership--have been bubbling under the surface for decades. These factors combined with rapid urbanization, high unemployment, especially among young males, ethnic political mobilization, the free flow of information, huge democratic expectations and, finally an incompetently rigged election, to ultimately boil over into a crisis. So, it's not just a 'tribal' thing.

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Taking the responsibility to protect

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

International Herald Tribune - By Desmond Tutu - Feb. 19 (Opinion) - The horrors of conflict in Africa continue today, but there is also a sign of how rapid response, with support from neighbors and the international community, can save lives and bring hope. In contrast to the crises in Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in 2003, we see today in Kenya the formation of an international consensus that it is unacceptable to ignore violence of the kind that has occurred in recent months or to consider the crisis as purely an internal matter of the state.

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