Somalia

Ebola Returns: A New Outbreak in the Heart of Congo As the world grapples with various health crises, a familiar shadow reemerges in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with a new outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD). Officials confirmed on September 4, 2025, that the country’s 16th outbreak is now underway in Kasai Province, sending ripples of concern through communities that have battled this virus before. A Troubling Diagnosis The index case is a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was admitted to a local hospital last…

Djibouti, Djibouti  — A decade after China’s big-ticket infrastructure spree swept across Africa, the shine is fading. Railways, highways, and ports still stand as symbols of ambition. But the debts behind them are now coming due. From Djibouti to Nairobi and Addis Ababa, governments are rethinking their dependence on Chinese loans. And Beijing, once the continent’s biggest builder, is rethinking its own playbook. For years, China was Africa’s largest bilateral lender, pumping more than $170 billion into projects…

Somalia’s president brings a climate plea to Addis Ababa as Africa seeks a united front ADDIS ABABA — Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud arrived in Ethiopia’s capital on Sunday as leaders from across Africa convened for the second Africa Climate Summit, a gathering that has shifted in recent years from platitudes to a sharpened insistence: poor nations deserve more money, and faster, to cope with climate shocks. Mohamud was greeted at Bole International Airport by senior Ethiopian officials and joined other high-level…

Breaking: Puntland State deploys troops to Sool to block voter registration as tensions spike What happened Puntland State authorities have deployed security forces to parts of Somalia’s Sool region to halt a federally backed voter registration drive, residents and local officials said Monday, deepening an already volatile political standoff in the country’s northeast. Convoys moved into Boocame district and the nearby Falariyale area—territory where electoral commissions from the federal government and a newly declared…

Nuruddin Farah’s Honorary Degree Is Also a Map of Where African Letters Are Headed On a damp London morning, SOAS, University of London, conferred an honorary doctorate on the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah — an author whose life’s work has been to rescue a country by rebuilding it on the page. The honor feels tidy and ceremonial; Farah’s novels are anything but. Over nearly five decades, from the dictatorship of Siad Barre to the age of global exile, he has written Somalia into visibility with an unblinking steadiness. You…

Burnsville woman charged as 75th defendant in Minnesota’s sweeping ‘Feeding Our Future’ case MINNEAPOLIS — Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged a Burnsville woman with siphoning nearly $1 million from a taxpayer-funded child nutrition program — the latest arrest in what authorities call the largest COVID-19 fraud case in the United States. Prosecutors say 44-year-old Muna Wais Fidhin misused federal money meant to serve meals to children during the pandemic, instead paying her mortgage, buying a car and sending…

Analysis: In Puntland State, a Clash Over Asphalt and Paychecks Reveals a Deeper Crisis In the semi-autonomous Somali region of Puntland State, a single sentence has cracked open a wider argument about what progress looks like—and what keeps a state together. “Roads are more important to us than their salaries,” Finance Minister Mohamed Farah Mahmoud said recently, defending public works spending as government employees report going months without pay. The backlash was swift and raw: civil servants, police, and ordinary…

How a proposed Ethiopia–North Western State of Somalia swap for Red Sea access was stopped by multilateral pressure When former North Western State of Somalia president Muse Bihi Abdi unveiled a deal that would have given landlocked Ethiopia a slice of Red Sea coastline in return for formal recognition of North Western State of Somalia, it briefly reconfigured the diplomatic maps of the Horn of Africa. The pact — which Bihi says offered Ethiopia roughly 20 kilometres of shoreline for a port and a military base — was never…

Kenya’s president travels to Addis Ababa as Ethiopia opens contested Grand Renaissance Dam ADDIS ABABA — Kenya’s President William Ruto arrived in Ethiopia on Sunday to attend the inauguration of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a sweeping hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile that has long been a flashpoint with downstream neighbours Egypt and Sudan. State House in Nairobi cast the visit as a milestone for continental cooperation. “This inauguration symbolizes Africa’s self-reliance and a major step in…

Somalia sets Sept. 9 restart for voter registration in push toward one-person, one-vote Somalia’s electoral clock will start ticking again next week. The country’s Independent National Electoral and Boundaries Commission announced Saturday that voter registration for long-promised one-person, one-vote elections will resume on Sept. 9 and run through Sept. 30 — a narrow window with outsized stakes for a nation attempting to exit decades of indirect, clan-based politics. What’s new Commission Chairman Abdikarin Ahmed Hassan…