The path of the eclipse began in Africa — passing through Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Somalia before crossing the Indian Ocean, where it reached its peak, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website.
On Monday night, after refusing her lawyers’ advice to pay, Mrs. Hussein was whisked off to jail, though her lawyers said that in the coming days a committee formed for her defense might pay the fine and free her.
Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.
In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.
And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a meal,” said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.
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Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
The Nigerian government's most prominent corruption fighter, Nuhu Ribadu, plans to resign Thursday under pressure from top politicians, including President Umaru Yar'Adua, according to a senior official in Ribadu's agency.
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Corruption has dogged Nigeria ever since the massive increase in oil prices and production in the 1970s, with billions of dollars of easy money enriching a relatively small but powerful elite while the rest of the nation consistently ranks among the world's worst in measures of poverty, development and ill health.
The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies.
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Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.
The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.
Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish — caught in America — that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.
And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle.
The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.
Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee’s version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members,` “They’re still of the mode that this should be American products we’re using our tax dollars to provide them.”
Mr. Peterson’s district got $367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.
“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”
A week ago, Yoonis Issay Alin was riding around in the back of a pickup, part of a squad of tough-looking guys with big trucks and big guns.
Now he is drooling on a metal cot, shot in the head over a parking spot.
All around him at Medina Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, young men writhe in steamy beds, their arms and legs trapped in traction ropes, their gunshot wounds the latest proof of a society out of control. It is hard to imagine there is enough gauze in this broken-down country to keep up.
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His skull is encased in a helmet of white medical tape. He has been drifting in and out of consciousness, and doctors say they have no way to gauge the amount of brain damage.
“There are no neurosurgeons here, no M.R.I.’s, no CAT scans, no psychiatrists,” said Sheikhdon Salad Elmi, director of Medina Hospital. “Can you imagine that? In a city where everyone needs therapy, not a single psychiatrist?”
Diplomats see international peacekeepers as the only way to stabilize Somalia once Ethiopian troops -- who helped the interim government oust rival Islamists over the New Year and are now propping up the administration -- return home.
But with Uganda the only country to pledge troops publicly, funding uncertain and African politicians clearly wary of a messy engagement in a nation in anarchy since 1991, many think it will be a long and difficult task to muster such a force.
Residents said a gang of thieves had been tapping the pipeline for months, carting away gasoline in tankers for resale.
Tapping is common in Nigeria, a major oil exporter, where many of the 130 million people live in woeful poverty amid widespread graft that makes a handful of people wealthy. One pilfered can of gasoline sold on the black market can earn the equivalent of two weeks of wages for a poor Nigerian.
Widespread corruption and mismanagement have left Nigeria’s refineries unable to meet demand, and fuel shortages are common. Christians heading home for Christmas and Muslims preparing for a feast day have jammed service stations for days across Lagos, a sprawling city of 13 million people. Many Nigerians contend they have gained little from decades of oil production in their country, saying natural gas flaring and oil spills have spread pollution, while they remain poor and a tiny elite grows rich.
“How can this be, that people are so poor in Nigeria that they will risk their lives for a little thing?” asked Bode Kuforiji, a university lecturer. “But boats leave for America every day filled with oil.”
Ethiopia has plunged into war with Somalia's Islamist forces, pushing ground troops deep into Somali territory on Sunday and attacking the airport in the capital of Mogadishu on Monday, in a major escalation that could turn Somalia's internal crisis into a violent religious conflict that engulfs the entire Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia's Christian-led government has with tacit American support been helping a weak interim government in Somalia that is threatened by forces loyal to the Islamic clerics who control the capital and much of the country.
...these days the deepest cleavage in Nigerian society yawns wider here than it does almost anywhere else — the chasm between the tiny, rich and powerful elite and the vast, impoverished majority of the nation’s 130 million people.
“They don’t want to see the common man, the poor man,” said Comrade Daniel, a motorcycle taxi driver, standing in the rubble of his neighborhood. He lost first his home and then his livelihood to a recent campaign to rid this stately capital of the blemishes of poverty. “They only care for themselves,” he said.
Mr. Daniel and others who live on the unruly edge of this tidy city in the mossy hills of central Nigeria say that Abuja has declared war on its poorest citizens.
In the interest of cultivating an image as a world-class city, comparable to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong, the government has been razing unauthorized and unsightly slums, clearing out street hawkers and banishing popular and cheap motorcycle taxis, all in the name of spiffing up the city.
The master plan’s housing estates unfurl with the orderliness of a planned subdivision: town houses and apartments for the well heeled, tract homes and villas for the even better heeled. But there is little provision for the army of civil servants, whose low wages place the graceful homes of Abuja out of reach.
As for the maids, drivers, security guards and laborers without whom this city would cease to function — people like Mr. Daniel and his sister — there is no place for them at all. Many have moved farther still, commuting for hours from neighboring states to escape the bulldozers.
The government has said it plans to help resettle those displaced by the demolition, estimated to be in the tens of thousands, but those who have lost their homes say no one has offered them any compensation or a new place to live. And so they are left with the bitter knowledge that their capital has no place for them.
Oil accounts for more than 95 percent of Nigeria's foreign earnings and 80 percent of total government revenue. But in Africa's most populous region of more than 130 million people, oil has manifested all the signs of a curse.
Little of the oil wealth is seen by the vast majority of the population who live on less than US$1 a day. Nigeria's financial crimes agency estimates that a total of US$380 billion has been stolen or wasted through corruption and mismanagement by a succession of military and civilian rulers.
The legislation adds to the growing isolation of gays and lesbians in the African nation where sodomy is illegal. In northern Nigeria, which is under Islamic law, homosexuality can be punishable by death and in the rest of the country by long prison terms.
Earlier this year Nigeria made it illegal for same-sex couples to go abroad to marry. When they return they could be imprisoned for five years. Even attending a gay wedding could result in imprisonment.
Residents of Bulo Burto who do not pray five times a day will be beheaded, an Islamic courts official said. The edict, which takes effect on Saturday, also orders the closing of shops and tea houses in the town, 124 miles northeast of the capital, during prayer time. Violators “will definitely be beheaded according to Islamic law,” said Sheik Hussein Barre Rage, chairman of the town’s Islamic court.
