Somalia

Somalia’s presidential elections have been marred by allegations of bribery, with up to $50,000 said to have changed hands among members of parliament, Al Jazeera has learnt. Senior diplomatic sources deployed in the region to ensure honest and fair election, have confirmed that the process of vote buying has been under way over the last few days. It was hoped that the vote for a new president, the first of its kind in decades, would alter the political landscape of the nation and be a milest...read more

About 90 Somali migrants stranded on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea for more than four days have been rescued, an Italian news agency and relatives say. Earlier this month, 54 people died of dehydration while trying to sail from Libya to Italy in an inflatable boat. More than one million Somalis have fled the country since 1991.

Successive Somali governments have not accounted for nearly $238 million, the bulk of which constituted bilateral assistance, according to an audit report made available exclusively to the East African.

Somalia's interim government has denied allegations of corruption contained in a leaked UN report. It alleged that around 70 per cent of money intended for development and reconstruction in a country racked by 20 years of war was unaccounted for. 'The systematic misappropriation, embezzlement and outright theft of public resources have essentially become a system of governance,' the leaked report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, published by the Somalia Report website, said.

Somalia's population exodus has crossed a new threshold, hitting the one million mark as more people continue to flee to the surrounding region, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said. The most recent arrivals continue to cite insecurity and dwindling food resources as the main reasons for their flight. Despite last week passing the 1 million mark for the first time since Somalia descended into violence in 1991, data compiled by UNHCR for the main arrival countries of Kenya and Ethiop...read more

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