Kenya
British freelance journalist previously based in Moscow and the Middle East (Jerusalem and Cairo), working for the AP, the Independent and others. Currently covering East Africa for the Independent from Nairobi.
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As Paul Onditi prepared to move his family back to Kenya after a decade as a struggling artist in Germany, his former art school professor tried to dissuade him. "How can you leave your life here and go back?" the teacher asked. "How will you survive?"
13; Until recently Godfrey Mwampembwa was one of Africa's best known political cartoonists and one of the prized assets of Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper. When he was suddenly dismissed from the paper late last year, many were left baffled.
Morning was several hours off when passengers boarded the ill-fated bus bound for Nairobi. Among them, teachers heading home for the long holidays started to doze off, others murmured quietly. An hour into the journey from Mandera in northern Kenya, Osinga Atibu was awoken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire.
His office tucked away in a shabby block just yards from one of Nairobi's busiest thoroughfares, Mbuthi Gathenji, a bespectacled lawyer in his 50s, has spent the best part of a decade trying to unravel a complex web of political intrigue in Kenya that lies at the heart of the murder of a troublesome Catholic priest.
Five years ago, the isolated outpost of Eyl was Somalia's most notorious pirate lair. Perched above the crashing waves of the Indian Ocean, the ramshackle town played host to wheeling and dealing pirate kingpins who would roar through the rutted streets in tinted 4x4s as captured ships languished in the shallow waters.
Kenya's security forces, including a police anti-terror unit which receives funding from Britain and the US, have abducted and murdered scores of terror suspects in recent months, activists and relatives of those missing have told The Independent.
The bullet holes are plastered over, the shattered glass restored. Two years after terror struck at Westgate in Nairobi, the upscale shopping mall is set to reopen amid many unanswered questions over what happened during the four-day siege.
Beyond alleys strewn with rubbish and lines of laundry suspended between rusted metal shacks, a rutted footpath leads to a brightly painted private school, an oasis of learning in one of Nairobi's most benighted spots. With corrugated iron for walls, chicken wire across the windows, and wooden desks, it may seem nothing out of the ordinary.
A pilot making a pass over Tsavo East national park early last year spotted elephants in distress. Flying in to take a closer look, he saw a group of dead elephants, their tusks hacked off, and the survivors moving among them, crazed with grief.
Archaeologists say the elimination of Mubarak's police services left a security vacuum and an open invitation to trespass without fear of reprisal. DAHSHUR, Egypt - An Egyptian archaeologist points to fresh motorcycle tracks on the desert sand, traces left by the gangs who dig under the cover of darkness for Pharaonic treasures.
The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him.
First they threatened to burn his house down. Then they pinned leaflets to his front door, denouncing him as a Jewish traitor. But Eli Tzavieli, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, is defiant. His only "crime" is to rent out his rooms to three Arab students attending the college in Safed, a religious city in northern Israel that was until recently more famous for Jewish mysticism and Madonna.
One night eight years ago in Ramallah, on the West Bank, a group of Israeli peace activists gathered at Yasser Arafat's home to stage a sit-in. Ariel Sharon, Israel's hardline prime minister, was suspected of having despatched a team to kill the Palestinian leader, and the activists saw their plan as the only way to deter the assassins.
JERUSALEM // Once the most reviled figure in Israel, Yoram Sheftel looks like a man who misses the attention. At the attorney's office in Tel Aviv, photos of high-profile clients, including the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, adorn the wall. But it is for his impassioned defence of John Demjanjuk, an alleged Nazi war criminal, that he is best known.