Rescue workers on Tuesday pulled dozens of bodies from the hold of an Egyptian fishing boat that sank in the Mediterranean Sea carrying hundreds of migrants, bringing the toll from the disaster to more than 200 dead.

Under pressure from the Kenyan government, which reluctantly hosts the seventh-largest refugee population in the world, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) agreed to accelerate the repatriation of those Somalis who were willing to return home.

An army spokesman says armed men in Mali's northern city of Timbuktu have killed a soldier and his cousin.

Egyptian officials say Islamic State militants have killed five Egyptian civilians and dumped their bodies, wearing orange jumpsuits, in a restive corner of the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt's president on Monday rejected criticism that the military's growing economic involvement was distracting it from its core duties, an issue that recently moved center stage when the armed forces said it would intervene to end shortages of baby formula.

Islamic extremists have killed eight soldiers and wounded 17 in two attacks in northeastern Nigeria, the country's military said Monday.

An Egyptian Health Ministry official says a total of 170 bodies have been pulled from the waters, five days after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean while attempting to head to Europe.

Struggling with extremism and economic woes, Tunisia now faces another menace: persistent drought across several regions that is creating new social tensions and threatening farming, a pillar of the economy.

South Sudan's rebel leader on Monday accused President Salva Kiir of wanting to turn the country into an "ethnic state" for his Dinka group.

On a site four times the size of Manhattan along the banks of the Niger river, the Ajaokuta steel plant was supposed to symbolize Nigeria's modernity and prosperity rather than its failure.

Human rights activists on Friday accused Kenyan police of executing three women who allegedly attacked a police station this month after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group.

The bodies of 162 people had been pulled from the waters off the Egyptian coast by Friday, two days after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean while attempting to head to Europe.

A 24-year-old sailor died of noncombat injuries Tuesday aboard the USS Wasp, which is forward-stationed in the Mediterranean Sea in support of the military’s air campaign in Libya, the Defense Department said.

A Kenyan police spokesman says two policemen are missing and three others wounded after suspected Islamic extremists attacked a police post in eastern Kenya.

The head of a human rights group in Congo says three more people have succumbed to their wounds after an attack by rebels in the northeast, raising the death toll to at least 10.

Army researchers from Fort Detrick are developing relationships with Ebola survivors in Uganda, who may hold the key to a vaccine or treatment for the deadly disease.

Survivors, some handcuffed to hospital beds, described watching women and children drown after an overcrowded migrant boat capsized off Egypt's coast, as Egyptian authorities said Thursday 51 bodies had been recovered and an international NGO estimated that over a hundred people were still missing at sea.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari has invited the United Nations to help negotiations to exchange the kidnapped schoolgirls from Chibok for detained leaders of Boko Haram, a government statement said Thursday.

The office of Congo President Joseph Kabila on Wednesday appealed for calm after two days of street clashes that left dozens dead, while accusing organizers of anti-government protests of trying to incite "bloody riots."

More than 44 people have been killed in Congo in two days of street clashes between security forces and protesters against a delayed presidential election, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher said Tuesday, and several opposition party buildings were burned.

Libyan authorities said Tuesday they were searching for two Italians and a Canadian abducted at gunpoint near the Algerian border, while another official said three North Koreans kidnapped more than a year ago have been freed from Islamic State group militants.

Islamic extremists said Tuesday they killed more than 40 troops from a multinational force in an attack on a convoy in northeast Nigeria — the fourth attack in three days.

A spokesman for Libyan forces based in the east accused a rival militia allied with the U.N.-backed government of carrying out an airstrike Tuesday that killed at least six women and a child.

The Obama administration, which has negotiated new relationships with states like Cuba, Iran and Myanmar, is now eyeing a rapprochement with Sudan, a nation that has long been designated a state sponsor of terrorism and whose current leader has been indicted on war crimes charges.

A soldier convicted of killing the mother of his then-14-year-old girlfriend in Pennsylvania because the woman disapproved of their relationship was sentenced Monday to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Boko Haram insurgents launched three attacks within hours in northeast Nigeria, witnesses and the army spokesman said Monday.

A Somali police officer says a powerful car bomb killed a Somali military general and five of his bodyguards in the capital Sunday.

Libyan officials say troops loyal to the internationally recognized parliament have repelled an attack on two key oil terminals.

South Sudan's government is challenging a new report by a U.S.-based watchdog group that says the country's leaders have amassed wealth abroad amid a conflict in which tens of thousands have been killed.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari apologized Saturday for plagiarizing President Barack Obama's 2008 victory speech and said he will punish those responsible.

The Nigerian army released 566 persons, including 355 babies, held by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in several camps across northeastern Borno state.

Niger's defense ministry says soldiers have killed 38 Boko Haram Islamic extremists during an operation in the country's southeast Diffa region.

More than one million refugees have fled South Sudan's ongoing civil war, overwhelming aid agencies and creating one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.

A wing flap that washed ashore on an island off Tanzania has been identified as belonging to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australian officials said Thursday.

A repatriation program for hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in the world's largest refugee camp is marked by fear and intimidation by Kenyan authorities, Human Rights Watch says.

As with refugee camps the world over, the place exudes the uneasiness of dispossessed people living in limbo. But the camp also is a reminder that the displaced find a way to carry on — they buy, they sell, they make a living. Even here, the entrepreneurial spirit survives.

Zimbabwe's military is fracturing along generational lines in a potentially dangerous turn for the southern African nation as President Robert Mugabe's ruling party splits over who will succeed him.

On the night of July 7, seven American diplomats in Juba left a farewell dinner early and were headed back to the U.S. Embassy, anxious to avoid the city's deepening chaos, when their two-car convoy was ambushed by the South Sudanese presidential guard of Salva Kiir.

When the men with machetes came to Maseka Alexandra's thatched mud hut on the edge of the Congolese town of Beni, her age may have been the only thing that saved her. Clad in military uniforms, they called her "mama" and asked where her husband was, then left, the 55-year-old recalled in an interview. Moments later, screams filled the neighborhood and people fled as more than 50 men and women were hacked to death, including one of Alexandra's two sons and her brother-in-law.

Sa’a, now 20 and studying physical and biological science in the United States, described her ordeal to a crowd of about 100, who sat in stunned silence.

Jean Ping is a big fish in a small pond. He is the most well-known government official in the small central African country of Gabon — apart from the Bongos, that is.

While held hostage for 111 days in Congo in 1964, Michael P. E. Hoyt was repeatedly threatened with execution. “We were faced with imminent death, but you cope,” he said. After three and a half months, they were rescued by Belgian paratroopers with U.S. air support. No diplomats died, but two missionaries and 18 foreigners perished.

After nearly a month of airstrikes against the Islamic State fighters dug in around the Libyan city of Sirte, U.S. helicopter gunships have been dispatched to help root out the extremist group from some of the denser parts of the city.

Nigerian military aircraft killed about 300 Boko Haram Islamist militants in a night attack on Aug. 19, Chief of Air Staff Sadiq Abubakar said.

The United States and its allies can't figure out what to do about Khalifa Hifter, the Libyan general whose refusal to support a fragile unity government has jeopardized hopes for stability in a country plagued by conflict.

A press release from spokesman Mabior Garang called the move an evacuation, and said it followed the "botched attempt to assassinate" Riek Machar.

Just eight months after West Africa’s Ebola epidemic was declared extinguished, researchers are reporting a curious and potentially revealing fact about the deadly viral infection.

The board decision said Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush “played a significant role in al-Qaida operations,” was an explosives expert and trainer and had no plans for life after Guantanamo. It essentially declared him too dangerous to go.

The World Health Organization said the wild polio virus has circulated undetected for five years — a major setback after Nigeria was declared polio-free in October.

An army official says the bodies of five soldiers have been found in a river in central Mali after an attack by Islamic extremists.

The positioning of a small number of elite U.S. personnel in the coastal city of Sirte deepens the involvement of Western nations in the fight against the Islamic State affiliate.

Sirte, once a city of 80,000 people, has about 1,000 residents remaining. Islamic State militants there totaled up to 1,000 fighters at one time. But their numbers have dwindled as well.

The parents contend in their lawsuit that it is “highly probable” that Hillary Clinton sent and received information about U.S. Department of State activities and covert operations in Benghazi via the email server she used during her four years as secretary of state.

A proposed U.N. resolution would establish a 4,000-strong regional force to provide security in South Sudan's capital and deter attacks on U.N. sites where over 30,000 civilians have sought refuge from fighting.

An Islamic extremist group says at least one of its fighters has been killed in clashes with Mali's army in the West African country.

The U.N.'s committee against torture is expressing "grave concern" after four Burundi lawyers were threatened with disbarment for contributing to its review of the country's recent chaos.

A local government official says an attack by rebels in eastern Congo has killed at least seven civilians and wounded three others.

A splinter group of Nigerian oil militants is accusing former President Goodluck Jonathan and other politicians in the oil-rich Niger Delta of sponsoring attacks on oil installations that have slashed the West African nation's petroleum production and government revenue.

The Saudi Interior Ministry says a member of the extremist Islamic State group was in contact through a social networking application with a Syrian asylum-seeker who blew himself up outside a bar in southern Germany, injuring 15 people.

The American air intervention has altered the military equation on the ground and given a much-needed boost to the morale of the fighters battling the Islamic State. In a densely packed urban environment, however, eradicating the militants from Sirte remains a formidable struggle.

Twenty years after the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the United Nations is once again facing sharp criticism for failing to protect civilians, this time in South Sudan.

South Africa's ruling party suffered its worst election setback since taking power at the end of apartheid a generation ago, with the African National Congress losing the capital, Pretoria, and its surrounding Tshwane metropolitan area. But it won a tight race for the country's biggest city, Johannesburg, election authorities reported Saturday night.

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American warplanes attacked Islamic State group fighters in northern Libya on Wednesday, marking a third consecutive day of U.S. airstrikes in the war-torn nation.

Uganda and Congo have agreed on a joint intelligence security plan to combat rebel groups active along the countries' border.

Nigeria's government has resumed paying stipends to former militants even as security forces' air and ground assaults have reportedly killed scores of fighters disrupting petroleum production in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

Abubakar Shekau was last heard of in March, when he appeared in a blurry video looking weak and defeated, saying, “For me the end has come.”

Nigerian internet scams are so prolific that the U.S. Embassy in Abuja has an entire page of its website dedicated to helping people protect themselves from fake Nigerian princes who write sob story emails about how only huge sums of American money will help save their lives.