Speaking to members of parliament, Abiy said many Ethiopians were killed fighting the Islamist group Al-Shabaab to help Somali authorities quell more than a decade-long insurgency and restore peace.

“Ethiopia, being a friend, does not wish any harm to come upon Somalia. Ethiopia does not acknowledge war against any country in principle. However, some forces are trying to incite conflict between the two nations, which should not happen,” Abiy told MPs.

“Our request is for sea access based on mutual interest.  This is useful not only for Ethiopia but also for regional cooperation.”

It came a day after Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said his government will only talk to Ethiopia once it retracted a memorandum of understanding in which it leased a parcel of land along the Red Sea from the separatist region of Somaliland. read more

On Sunday, gunmen killed seven people, including six Ethiopian nationals and injured a number of others in an overnight attack in southern Somalia border town of Beled Hawo in Gedo region. No one has yet claimed responsibility. read more

Contact us: info@somaliguardian.com

“I express my sincere condolences to the people and government of Namibia on the passing of H.E. Dr. Hage G. Geingob, the President of Namibia. Dr. Hage G. Geingob was a distinguished leader who devoted his life to the service of his people and was a respected voice on the African continent,” Mohamud tweeted.

“During this difficult time, we stand in solidarity with his family and the Namibian people as they mourn the loss of a great leader.”

Contact us: info@somaliguardian.com

Fighting erupted in Amhara last July between federal forces and a local militia called Fano, which has accused the government of undermining the region’s security.

The state of emergency handed the government powers to impose curfews, restrict people’s movement and ban public gatherings. Since August, government forces have pushed Fano fighters out of cities but fighting has continued in smaller towns and rural areas.

Parliament said the extension was granted following a request by the justice minister and deliberations among lawmakers. The government denies it is seeking to undermine Amhara’s security.

The conflict there erupted less than a year after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government reached a peace deal in November 2022 to end a two-year civil war in the neighbouring Tigray region that killed tens of thousands.

Fano militiamen fought alongside the army against Tigrayan forces, but relations between the two sides quickly soured. This was in part due to the peace deal, which many in Amhara said failed to address their concerns about security threats from Tigray and another neigbouring region, Oromiya.

The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has documented a range of alleged abuses in the Amhara conflict, most of which it has attributed to government forces.

In October, it said dozens of civilians had been killed by drone strikes and house-to-house searches by government forces.

The government has not responded to specific allegations of abuses in Amhara but said in November that an EHRC report on the subject lacked balance.

EHRC head Daniel Bakele said on social media on Friday that his organisation was “gravely concerned” about the implications of the extension for human rights and the humanitarian situation.

Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw, Writing by Bhargav Acharya, Editing by Aaron Ross and Angus MacSwan

Residents in a nearby building screamed as a column of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air just before midnight, briefly forming a mushroom cloud, video posted on social media and verified by Reuters showed.

The government said three people had died in the explosion at a gas refilling plant and 280 more were being treated at hospitals around Nairobi. The Kenyan Red Cross said others were being treated at a triage point.

The fire engulfed a nearby textile and garment warehouse, while damaging several vehicles and commercial and residential properties, the government said.

“The fire caught up with me from almost one kilometre away as I was escaping,” survivor Edwin Machio told Reuters.

“The flames from the explosion knocked me down and burnt me on my neck,” he added, taking off his shirt to show burnt flesh on his shoulders and upper arms.

A Reuters picture from the scene of the fire showed one body lying on the ground, covered with a blanket, while smoke billowed from several burning houses nearby.

Kenya’s Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) said last year it had rejected three applications for construction permits for a Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) storage and refilling plant at the site of the explosion because of the high population density around it.

EPRA said it had asked the applicant to submit a risk assessment “indicating the radiation blast profiles in the unfortunate case of an explosion” but that this was never done.

It was not immediately clear who owned the site.

Reporting by Humphrey Malalo and Thomas Mukoya; Additional reporting Duncan Miriri; Writing by George Obulutsa, Bhargav Acharya and Aaron Ross; Editing by Jamie Freed, Christian Schmollinger, William Maclean

Mali, which is among the world’s poorest countries, is one of Africa’s leading gold producers.

Gold mining sites are regularly the scene of deadly landslides and authorities struggle to control artisanal mining of the precious metal.

“It started with a noise. The earth started to shake,” Oumar Sidibe, an official for gold miners in the southwestern town of Kangaba, told AFP, of the incident on Friday.

“There were over 200 gold miners in the field. The search is over now. We’ve found 73 bodies,” he said.

The same toll was given by a local councillor.

Mali’s ministry of mines in a statement on Tuesday had announced the death of several miners but did not give precise figures.

The government offered its “deepest condolences to the grieving families and to the Malian people”.

It also called on “communities living near mining sites and gold miners to scrupulously respect safety requirements and to work only within the perimeters dedicated to gold panning”.

Gold mining in the Sahel region is a dangerous business.

In February 2022, at least 59 people were killed in southwestern Burkina Faso after the explosion of a stockpile of dynamite at an artisanal gold mining site.

Mining accidents are also regularly reported in Guinea, Senegal and western Mali.

Mali produced 72.2 tonnes of gold in 2022 and the metal contributed 25 percent of the national budget, 75 percent of export earnings and 10 percent of GDP, the then minister of mines Lamine Seydou Traore said in March last year.

Since taking power in 2020, the military leaders in Mali have pledged to restore sovereignty and enable the country to benefit from its natural wealth.

It adopted a new mining code in August, enabling the state to take up to a 30-percent stake in new projects.

The government has said the move should bring in at least 500 billion CFA francs ($830 million) to the annual state budget.

Mali’s mining sector is dominated by foreign groups, including Canada’s Barrick Gold and B2Gold, Australia’s Resolute Mining and Britain’s Hummingbird Resources, which continue to operate despite the political instability that has plagued the country for years.

But artisanal mines also continue to flourish and attract thousands of gold miners.

sd-kmt-amt/acc/kjm

Africa’s second most populous country announced earlier this month that it intended to formally go into default, having been under severe financial strain in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a two-year civil war that ended in November 2022.

It had been supposed to make the payment on Dec. 11, but technically had up until Tuesday to provide the money due to a 14-day ‘grace period’ clause written into the $1 billion bond.

According to two sources familiar with the situation, bondholders had not been paid the coupon as of the end of Friday Dec. 22, the last international banking working day before the grace period expires.

Ethiopian government officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday or over the weekend, but the widely-expected default will see it join two other African nations, Zambia and Ghana, in a full-scale “Common Framework” restructuring.

The East African country first requested debt relief under the G20-led initiative in early 2021.

Progress was initially delayed by the civil war but, with its foreign exchange reserves depleted and inflation soaring, Ethiopia’s official sector government creditors, including China agreed to a debt service suspension deal in November.

On Dec. 8, the government said parallel negotiations it had been having with pension funds and other private sector creditors that hold its bond had broken down.

Credit ratings agency S&P Global then downgraded the bond, to “Default” on Dec. 15 on the assumption that the coupon payment would not be made.

Reporting by Rachel Savage and Karin Strohecker, Additional Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw in Addis Ababa, Editing by Marc Jones and Aurora Ellis

The finance ministry said on Friday that talks with a group of bondholders had broken down as the two sides disagreed over how long to extend the maturity and spread out the repayments of its single $1 billion international bond maturing in December 2024.

Non-payment of the bond coupon would put Ethiopia, which requested a debt overhaul under the G20 Common Framework in early 2021, on track to default after the grace period of 14 days expires.

Ethiopia had – until now – serviced interest payments on its international bond.

However, given recently secured debt service suspension agreements with official creditors, including China, and some commercial lenders, the finance ministry said in a statement on Monday that it would “seek a broadly similar treatment” from bondholders.

“It would be important to treat all our creditors equitably,” the ministry said in a statement, which seemed to echo comments last week that a payment was not on the cards.

But in separate comments made to Reuters on Monday, Eyob Tekalign, State Minister of Fiscal Policy and Public Finance, told Reuters that “authorities’ intention is to remain current on our obligations”.

He also said there would be a call with investors holding the international bond on Thursday, December 14.

The combined cost of the COVID-19 pandemic and a civil war in its northern Tigray region that ended in November 2022 has left Ethiopia, long seen as one of Africa’s most promising economies, struggling to pay its debts.

The bonds were zigzagging on Monday, initially dropping more than 1.8 cents on the dollar before reversing losses to add 0.2 cents and trade at 60.995 cents at 1016 GMT, according to Tradeweb data.

Outlines of the various proposals exchanged between Ethiopia’s government and its bondholders in the statement on Friday showed the difference centres around the maturity as well as the size of the coupon.

In its final proposal, Ethiopia suggested an amortising structure of eight equal payments from July 2028 to January 2032 and a 5.5% coupon, according to the finance ministry’s Friday statement.

The last bondholder group proposal wanted to see a much faster amortisation between July 2028 and July 2029 and a 6.625% coupon, the ministry said.

“The discussion with few bondholders did not bear fruit as we did not agree on terms,” Eyob said.

“We are confident that we can work out a plan that works for both of us and have a good chance of being accepted by the OCC (hence the need for broadly similar treatment),” he wrote, referring to the official creditor committee.

Ethiopia is also seeking a four-year loan from the International Monetary Fund, which has said discussions with the government are ongoing and a staff visit to the country is “likely to take place early next year.”

Reporting by Dawit Endeshaw, Writing by Rachel Savage; Editing by Aaron Ross, Karin Strohecker, William Maclean, Peter Graff

The Kenya Coast Guard also retrieved the body of a man who was swept away while riding his motorbike.

Authorities on Saturday said that 10 people had been confirmed dead at the coast following three days of unrelenting heavy rains and floods.

More than 20,000 families have been displaced across the four affected counties of Mombasa, Kilifi, Kwale and Tana River, the Coast regional police commissioner Rhoda Onyancha said on Saturday.

Overall, dozens of people have died and thousands displaced across the country since the beginning of November after heavy rains and floods caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon.

The heavy rains and resulting floods have killed dozens more in neighbouring countries, including Somalia and Ethiopia.

“Shells fell on the Al-Nau hospital,” in Omdurman, the twin city of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, a medical source told AFP by telephone.

Omdurman has been the site of fierce battles between the regular army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo who have been at war since April.

Rights groups have accused both sides of targeting health facilities since the conflict began on April 15.

In August, medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that Al-Nau hospital “is one of the last health facilities open in Omdurman”.

“It’s also the only facility with a trauma emergency room or surgical capacity in north Omdurman, so all wounded patients in the city are brought there,” MSF said, while other medics have called the hospital “a beacon of hope”.

According to the United Nations, more than 70 percent of the country’s hospitals are out of service.

Though most of the fighting was previously contained to the capital and the western region of Darfur, it has also spread to areas south of Khartoum according to witnesses.

In Jabal Awliya town, 50 kilometres (31 miles) south of the capital, medics “have had to halt all work at the hospital since last night due to heavy artillery shelling,” a doctor told AFP.

“Dozens of wounded” remained in the hospital, waiting for urgent treatment, he added.

More than 9,000 people have been killed in the Sudan conflict so far, according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.

But aid groups and medics have repeatedly warned the real toll exceeds recorded figures, with many of those wounded and killed never reaching hospitals or morgues.

Monday’s shelling comes a day after fighting resumed in El Obeid, the state capital of North Kordofan 350 kilometres south of Khartoum.

One child was killed and at least 16 injured in the fighting while some homes were destroyed, a committee of pro-democracy lawyers that have worked to document atrocities said.

The war has caused an estimated 5.5 million people to flee, both within Sudan and across borders, according to the United Nations.

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash in the county of Lamu in coastal Kenya. Kenyan defense forces operate in the area to help deter the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab group, based across the border in Somalia.

The Department of Defense (DoD) said the Air Force helicopter crashed while on night patrol.

“A Board of Inquiry has been constituted and dispatched to the scene to establish the cause of the crash,” the statement added.

Security agents speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to reporters told The Associated Press that all military personnel and crew on board the helicopter died.

But the DoD which said it “condole(s) with the families of the crew” did not mention how many people were killed.

Kenyan troops are also in Somalia under the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia to help in fighting al-Shabab. The Kenyan forces deployed to Somalia in 2011, but there are now plans to withdraw the multinational forces as Somali troops take over responsibility for their country’s security.

Al-Shabab has increased attacks in Kenya in recent months, killing dozens of people in the border region as the rebels feel pressure from a Somali military offensive launched last year after the election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as president in May.