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KISMAYO, Somalia — Jubaland President Ahmed Islam Mohamed Madobe pressed the United States to increase investment in Somalia’s federal member states during talks in Kismayo with a U.S. delegation led by Ambassador Richard H. Riley, as the region seeks to consolidate security gains against al-Shabab. In the engagement with the ambassador and senior diplomats, Madobe outlined a slate of priorities centered on security, governance and economic development, highlighting what his administration described as steady progress in…

President Donald Trump said Thursday he had a "very productive meeting" with New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani after the two met in the Oval Office to discuss cost-of-living pressures and public safety in the nation’s largest city. The session, requested by Mamdani, came amid earlier public sparring between the two leaders. Trump had threatened to withhold federal funding for New York and used inflammatory language to describe the 34-year-old former state lawmaker — calling him a "radical left lunatic," a communist…

Somalia and Turkey move to seal a labor pact — and raise bigger questions about jobs, skills, and dignity In a quiet room in Doha on Friday, Somali Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Yusuf Mohamed sat down with Turkey’s Minister of Labour and Social Security, Prof. Dr. Vedat Işıkhan, to push forward a bilateral labor cooperation agreement. On paper, it is a technical accord: training programs, civil service capacity-building, and a plan to spur job creation. In practice, it is also a test of whether two close partners…

Somalia’s cabinet meeting signals a push to turn battlefield gains into public services Mogadishu’s message: accountability, services, and a long game In Mogadishu on Thursday, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud sat at the head of the long table in the Council of Ministers and offered his cabinet a familiar charge with a sharper edge: make the machinery of government move faster, cleaner, and closer to the people. The weekly meeting, officials said, looked beyond the security front lines to the hard work of…

Somali Politics Spill Into Nairobi Again — And Mogadishu Pushes Back It is a familiar scene in East African diplomacy: Somali politicians gathering in a Nairobi hotel to hash out the country’s future far from Mogadishu’s checkpoints and political heat. This week, that well-worn script met a forceful rebuttal from Somalia’s defense minister, who said enough is enough. In a sharply worded post, Defense Minister Ahmed Macallin Fiqi condemned a Nairobi meeting of opposition figures and regional leaders — among them Puntland…

Ukraine hit by one of its largest overnight aerial assaults as Zelensky prepares to meet Trump at UN Ukraine scrambled on the ground and in the skies early on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly, after what President Volodymyr Zelensky described as one of the heaviest aerial barrages of the war. Moscow, meanwhile, painted the exchanges as reciprocal and defensive, underscoring how the conflict remains on a hair-trigger across multiple fronts even as diplomacy is scheduled to resume at New York. Massive strikes,…

Somalia’s Public Embrace of Qatar Signals Shifting Alignments in the Gulf–Horn of Africa Nexus DOHA — When Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud stepped into the Amiri Diwan in Doha on Monday, he did more than pay a diplomatic courtesy call. In a terse, unequivocal statement — “The Somali government and its people stand in full solidarity with our Qatari brothers. We will not accept any violation of the sovereignty or stability of the State of Qatar” — Mohamud signalled a wider intent: to knit Somalia closer to a Gulf…

Sowing Seeds of Change: Senegal and France Redefine Their Relationship On a crisp autumn afternoon, the stately halls of the Élysée Palace echoed with the voices of two leaders navigating a complex web of history, diplomacy, and shared aspirations. Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and French President Emmanuel Macron sat down for a meeting that was expected to redefine the longstanding relationship between their nations. With the backdrop of France's recent military withdrawal from Senegal, ending over six decades…

On a Monday rendezvous in Nairobi, Kenya's President William Ruto held discussions with William Burns, the CIA Director, while joined by Noordin Haji, Ruto's African counterpart. Fast-forward two years since the Ethiopian Tigray conflict reached a resolution on October 28, 2022. Although the peace pact supposedly ended hostilities, experts contend that thorny issues still linger unresolved. Tune into today's VOA 60 for more updates on developments across Africa.

At the African Defense Ministers Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, military brass from across the continent gathered to chat about pivoting from the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) to the fresh African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM). Mogadishu (AX) — On October 16, 2024, amidst explicit disapproval from Somalia, Ethiopia hosted a confab of Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs) involved in ATMIS. The hoopla took place during the African Defense Leaders Conference in Addis…