Nairobi - At least 29 people died and 24 others were seriously injured in Kenya Monday after a truck collided head on with a bus, police said.

The accident occurred shortly after midnight on the main road between the capital Nairobi and the coastal town of Mombasa.

The two vehicles were travelling at high speed at the time of the collision, killing 26 bus passengers and three onboard the lorry on impact.

Road accidents are common in the East African nation, where reckless driving, often involving alcohol, combines with a run-down road network to create deadly conditions.

Nairobi- Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Friday appealed for 470 million dollars to feed 10 million people facing a food shortage in the East African nation.

Kibaki called a national emergency, blaming the shortages on drought, a disruption to planting by last year's post-election violence and high fertilizer costs.

However, the government is also investigating a scandal in which millions of bags of maize imported to address the crisis were allegedly sold on to South Sudan by a cartel involving agricultural ministry officials.

Nairobi/Mogadishu - Islamist insurgents have executed a Somali politician in the port town of Kismayo for working with Ethiopian forces occupying Somalia, reports said Friday.

The Islamists seized control of Kismayo last August and implemented Sharia law.

A 12-year-old girl was stoned to death for adultery there despite claims that she was in fact raped.

Radio Shabelle said that Abdirahaman Xaji Mohamed, also known as Wadiiro, was executed for working with a warlord sympathetic to the Ethiopians.

Nairobi- Barack Obama's African relatives will take a front seat when their most famous family member takes his oath as 44th president of the United States in Washington next Tuesday.

His 87-year-old grandmother Sarah Obama, who raised Obama's deceased father, was among several relatives who travelled from her home in Kenya to Washington on Friday. Further members of the large clan - Obama's father had 8 siblings and four wives - are expected over the weekend.

Grandmother Sarah had already witnessed Obama's swearing in as senator in 2005 and still remembers the US capital with mixed feelings: "Much too cold!"

Nairobi - Kenneth Kamua Njuguna stands in the Kenyan camp for the internally displaced he has called home for the last year, and holds up his left arm to reveal a network of scar tissue.

A gang of Maasai warriors hacked Njuguna with machetes, clubs and spears at the height of the violence that swept Kenya after disputed elections on December 27, 2007, then left him for dead in a bush.

Njuguna, 34, was lucky. A group of women fetching water found him and took him to hospital.

Nairobi- Somali gunmen on Thursday shot and killed an aid worker with the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the second in three days, as he distributed aid near Mogadishu, the agency said.

"Unknown gunmen shot and killed him during a food distribution at Daynile, 10 kilometres north-west of Mogadishu," Nairobi-based WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"They then put his body in a WFP vehicle and drove off, shortly before pushing his body from vehicle and driving away," he added.