South Sudan's warring leaders will meet face-to-face for the first time in almost two years on Wednesday amid efforts to end a five-year civil war, the government of neighboring Ethiopia said Tuesday.

The number of countries involved in "violent conflicts" is the highest in 30 years, while the number of people killed in conflicts has risen tenfold since 2005, the U.N. secretary-general said Tuesday.

Libya's coast guard says it has recovered the bodies of five migrants and rescued 186 others, including women and children, in separate operations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Malian soldiers killed at least 25 civilians in the central Mopti region last week, a civic association and residents said Tuesday, as concerns rose over alleged abuses during counterterror operations.

Testimony has amounted to a crash course in history for a jury largely unfamiliar with a conflict in a nation thousands of miles and an ocean away. The accounts highlight Liberia's complicated history with the U.S. and American efforts to influence the civil war.

The solo killer stabbed two people to death early on Thursday while they were praying in Malmesbury, about 43 miles from Cape Town, the South African Police Service said. The suspect was then shot by police. It is the second such incident in the country in as many months.

Uganda's military says a former ally of the longtime president who was recently fired as national police chief has been taken into custody for unspecified questioning.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on Tuesday defended austerity measures aimed at reviving the economy, amid fears of public anger that may have motivated the arrests of activists and bloggers in recent weeks.

The U.S. Sixth Fleet, which is based in Naples, Italy, said in a brief statement that the USNS Trenton on Tuesday "rendered assistance to mariners in distress that it encountered while conducting routine operations in the Mediterranean Sea."

Mali's government says the army has killed at least 10 extremists after they attacked a village in the central Mopti region.

International Criminal Court judges on Tuesday ordered the interim release of former Congolese Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba, days after he was acquitted on appeal of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The U.N. peacekeeping chief said Monday the situation in Sudan's troubled Darfur region "has changed radically for the better" and the United Nations and the African Union are recommending new sharp cuts in their joint security force.

Civilians are caught in a deadly escalation of violence in Cameroon between security forces and separatists seeking an English-speaking state, Amnesty International said in a new report Tuesday.

The Pentagon said Staff Sgt. Alexander W. Conrad, 26, of Chandler, Arizona, died Friday of injuries sustained from what it called enemy indirect fire. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Two boats were stopped Saturday off the coast of the western Zuwara district and the capital, Tripoli. It says the boats were carrying 152 migrants, including 19 women and three children.

An Eritrean national who was denied asylum in the United States and was being sent back to his homeland has died in an apparent suicide in a holding area at Cairo International Airport, airport officials said on Saturday.

The U.S. forces were on a patrol with Somali and Kenyan troops when they were attacked with mortars and small arms in southern Somalia by fighters aligned with the terrorist group al-Shabab.

The U.N. Security Council warned Thursday that "internal and external pressures risk undermining Somalia's political unity" and expressed serious concern at the ongoing threats posed by the al-Shabab Islamic extremist group.

When a group of suspected Islamist militants beheaded 10 villagers in Mozambique's gas-rich north late last month, it ratcheted up concerns that spreading attacks in the remote region could threaten a potential $30 billion in investment.

The two brothers of Adalbert Wanza made a 170-mile round trip voyage on foot, boat and motorcycle through Congo's dense rain forest to bring him, and ultimately the rest of the world, grave news.

What started last year with an unusual arms deal has expanded to include military training and talk of mining exploration. Now, some observers believe, Russia is in position to expand its influence throughout the continent, unsettling Western countries who have supported the Central African Republic for years.

Egypt may have to import more wheat -- and at higher prices -- as problems from payment disputes to a fungus-tainted cargo disrupt supplies to one of the world's top importers.

On May 20, Cameroon's national day, citizens in the capital of Yaounde marched in parades, and President Paul Biya congratulated armed forces on their commitment to peace and safety. At the same time, in the country's unstable Anglophone regions, separatists kidnapped a mayor, killed two police officers and intimidated people who tried to celebrate the holiday.

The violence is stoking Nigeria's ethnic and religious divisions and is rivaling Boko Haram's nine-year-old Islamist insurgency in the northeast as the nation's biggest security crisis.

Dozens of health workers in the northwestern provincial capital, Mbandaka, have received vaccinations amid expectations that some will be deployed to the rural epicenter of the epidemic. Front-line workers are especially at risk of contracting the virus, which spreads in contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, including the dead.

The United States has pledged to provide $8 million to support the global response to the growing Ebola outbreak in Congo, officials said Tuesday. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced $7 million commitment Tuesday at the World Health Assembly in Geneva that added to an initial $1 million pledge last week.

The World Health Organization said Friday that criteria had not yet been met to declare a public health emergency of international concern in Congo, where three cases of Ebola have now been confirmed in an urban area.

Video

More than an hour after their team of 11 American and 34 Nigerien troops was attacked just outside the village of Tongo Tongo, the American survivors – six Green Berets and an intelligence contractor – drafted final words to families and friends, a video narration of the ambush revealed.

Nineteen people have died of Ebola in Congo as health officials plan to send an experimental vaccine to prevent the spread of the virus that killed thousands in West Africa a few years ago.

How Army Sgt. La David T. Johnson went from being deemed "missing" by the U.S. military to "killed in action" became a central question in the months after the October 4, 2017, ambush in Niger which also killed three other U.S. soldiers and marked the single deadliest military operation for U.S. forces in Africa since the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.

The father of a soldier killed in an ambush in Niger last year said his family does not blame two Army captains the U.S. military cited for lapses in planning in an investigation summary released Thursday.

The Pentagon released a slim, eight-page executive summary of a larger report detailing the disastrous Special Operations mission in Niger that left four U.S. soldiers dead on Oct. 4. But in the absence of the full 180-page report, many questions remain.

No single failure was to blame for a botched Special Forces mission in Niger that led to the deaths of four U.S. troops at the hands of Islamic State-aligned militants, according to a Pentagon investigation.