Nairobi/Kinshasa  - A mini

Nairobi- The Democratic Republic of Congo's armed forces are undermining the prospects of peace by working alongside rebel groups to mine tin and gold in the east of the resource-rich African nation, independent watchdog Global Witness said Wednesday.

The DR Congo's army (FARDC), supported by the United Nations peacekeeping force, is supposed to be fighting the Hutu Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), a group implicated in the 1994 massacre in neighbouring Rwanda.

However, Global Witness said that Congolese soldiers were collaborating with the FDLR in order to profit from the mining industry.

Nairobi - Somali pirates on Wednesday hijacked a South Korean cargo ship with 21 crew onboard but failed in an attempt to seize a Greek vessel in the Gulf of Aden, a maritime official said.

"Pirates attacked a fully loaded South Korean bulk carrier en route from Europe to Asia and successfully hijacked her," Noel Choong of the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Centre told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Piracy has surged this year in the Gulf of Aden, part of an important shipping route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal.

Nairobi- The United Nations Special Representative for Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah called for international action Friday to combat a surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia.

Piracy has surged this year in the Gulf of Aden, part of an important shipping route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal.

Somalia's transitional federal government, which has no navy to speak of and is embroiled in combating a bloody insurgency, has been unable to control the pirates.

Nairobi - Some 3 million children are at risk of death, disease and malnutrition in the Horn of Africa as aid fails to flow, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said Friday.

More then 14 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti are critically affected, and the numbers are "on an alarming upward trajectory," UNICEF said.

"Strong national leadership is needed at this critical juncture, and more international funding must be quickly mobilized," UNICEF's Regional Director for East and Southern Africa Per Engebak said in a statement.

"The risks to children and their families are immense and we are running out of time to reverse them," he continued.

Nairobi/Accra - Faster progress must be made in giving developing countries greater responsibility for spending international aid, participants at a conference aimed at improving aid effectiveness said Thursday.

The Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which began Tuesday, follows on from a 2005 meeting in Paris, where over 100 countries and agencies signed up to the Paris Declaration.

Signatories committed themselves to improving the delivery and use of aid by 2010.

Participants at a roundtable in Accra said in a statement that progress since Paris had been slow and called on donor nations to move away from imposing unilateral conditions for spending aid and focus instead on accountability.