For too many Africans, “conflict is a part of life,” President Obama told Ghana’s Parliament on Saturday.

“There are wars over land and wars over resources. And it is still far too easy for those without conscience to manipulate whole communities into fighting among faiths and tribes,” Obama said.

“These conflicts are a millstone around Africa’s neck. Africa’s diversity should be a source of strength, not a cause for division,” he added.

Obama stressed that the United States had a responsibility to support “development that provides opportunity for more people.” He noted that Africa is rich in resources, and has the capacity for successful business.

However, he added: “Dependence on commodities — or on a single export — concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, and leaves people too vulnerable to downturns.”

“History shows that countries thrive when they invest in their people and infrastructure, when they promote multiple export industries, develop a skilled workforce, and create space for small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs.”

Obama said the United States has committed $63 billion to a global, comprehensive health strategy.

“Building on the strong efforts of President [George W.] Bush, we will carry forward the fight against HIV/AIDS. We will pursue the goal of ending deaths from malaria and tuberculosis, and we will work to eradicate polio.

“We will fight neglected tropical disease. And we won’t confront illnesses in isolation — we will invest in public health systems that promote wellness, and focus on the health of mothers and children,” Obama said.

Obama praised the African nation for working to put its democratic government on a firmer footing, with peaceful transfers to powers. Obama stressed that all nations must support “strong and sustainable” governments.

“History offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people are more prosperous, more stable, and more successful than governments that do not,” he told Ghana’s Parliament.

The visit by the first African-American president in the United States sparked a frenzy in the country as street vendors sold miniature U.S. flags, and massive billboards with pictures of a smiling Obama and “akwaaba, ” the local word for welcome, were set up in the capital city. Watch how Ghana is celebrating Obama’s visit »

“People in Ghana are printing clothes for this occasion,” said Adrian Landry, general manager of a beach hotel in Accra.

“The fact that his father is African and he picked us makes us special,” he said. “He is endorsing our strong democracy in Ghana. This is historic.”

Obama’s speech Saturday didn’t just focus on Ghana. Obama said that much of Africa’s promise is going unfulfilled, and he pointed to Kenya — where his father was born — as an example.

“Countries like Kenya, which had a per-capita economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born, have been badly outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent. In many places, the hope of my father’s generation gave way to cynicism, even despair,” he said.

Before Saturday’s speech, Obama said he picked Ghana partly because of its commitment to democracy.

“By traveling to Ghana, we hope to highlight the effective governance that they have in place,” he said in an interview with AllAfrica.com.

Obama’s visit to the nation is the third by a sitting American president. Bill Clinton was the first U.S. president to visit Ghana in 1998 as part of a six-nation Africa tour. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, stopped there as part of a four-nation Africa tour during his last year of office.

Obama, who recently attended the G-8 summit in Italy, will not visit any other country in the continent during the trip. – CNN

Somalia’s hard-line Islamist rebels beheaded seven people on Friday for being “Christians” and “spies” in the latest implementation of strict Sharia law by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab movement, witnesses said.

Though al-Shabaab has carried out such punishments before in regions it controled, the beheadings on Friday were thought to be their largest number of executions at one time, Somalis said.

“Al-Shabaab told us that they were beheaded for reasons they described as being Christian followers and spies,” said one relative, who gave his name only as Aden, after the executions in the south-central town of Baidoa.

The group beheaded three people in the region last month.

Al-Shabaab, which means “Youth” in Arabic, have vowed to rule the majority Muslim nation by a hardline interpretation of Islamic law. The group has dug up Sufi graves, forced women to wear veils and amputated limbs for theft.

Somalia’s government has been unable to wrest control of large tracts of the Horn of Africa nation and the capital from Shabaab militants who continue to wage guerrilla-style attacks on Somali troops and an African Union force there. – Al Arabiya

Africa took center stage at the G8 summit on Friday, with rich nations eager to show they will honor past aid pledges and approve a $15 billion farming program to help poor nations feed themselves.

After two days of talks focused on the economic crisis, trade and global warming, the final day of the meeting in Italy looked at problems facing the poorest nations, with a U.S.-led focus on aid for farmers rather than emergency food supplies.

The United Nations says the number of malnourished people has risen over the past two years and is expected to top 1.02 billion this year, reversing a four-decade trend of declines.

“Food aid is necessary because we have people suffering from drought, from flood, from conflicts and what they want is immediate food to eat,” Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said at the L’Aquila summit.

“But if we have to feed 1 billion hungry people, we have to help them produce their own food,” he told Reuters

The G8 was expected to pledge $15 billion over three years for agriculture in poor countries to improve food insecurity.

G8 leaders promised in Gleneagles in 2005 to increase annual aid by $50 billion by 2010, half of which was meant for African countries. But aid bodies say some G8 countries have gone back on their word, especially this year’s G8 host, Italy.

African leaders said they would voice their concerns, with Ethiopian premier Meles Zenawi telling Reuters: “The key message for us is to ask the G8 to live up to their commitments.”

LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS

Besides Meles, the leaders of Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa joined their G8 counterparts to discuss food security and farming, and to push their demand for compensation for the ravages of climate change.

It was not clear how much of the $15 billion was new funding and how much each country would give. The United States, Japan and European Union were expected to contribute $3 billion each.

The focus on agricultural investments reflects a U.S.-led shift away from emergency aid assistance toward longer-term strategies to try to make communities more self-sufficient.

Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade told Reuters that Barack Obama, who will make his first visit to Africa as U.S. president after the G8, brought a welcome new focus on African farming.

Wade, who has championed efforts to increase agriculture in his West African country, which relies heavily on food imports, said Obama “really has the will to focus on food in Africa.”

“The United States produces maize and some crops and sends it to people in famine, but the new conception is to produce these crops in Africa and not in the United States,” Wade said.

But the $15 billion compares unfavorably with $13.4 billion which the G8 says it disbursed between January 2008 and July 2009 for global food security.

British charity ActionAid has warned that, with one billion hungry, decisions at the G8 could “literally make the difference between life and death for millions in the developing world.”

Japan and the European Union were championing a code of conduct for responsible investment in the face of growing farmland acquisition or “land grabs” in emerging nations.

SUMMIT FRUSTRATION

The l’Aquila summit has produced checkered results on other issues, making only limited progress in crucial climate talks following the refusal by major developing nations to sign up to the goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“There is a bit of frustration because one would like to convince everyone about everything and obtain all the results straight way, but things are progressing,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters late on Thursday.

G8 leaders said the global financial crisis still posed serious risks to the world economy, further stimulus packages for growth might still be required and that it was dangerous to implement “exit strategies” from emergency measures too early.

“Reaching the bottom of the slump is not when you start with exit strategies. We need to choose a point where we’ve already got some way out of the trough,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday.

She dismissed a Chinese proposal, aired at the summit, for debate on seeking an alternative global reserve currency to the dollar in the long term as something that was not of “practical relevance” for the time being.

The summit wraps up at lunch-time to be followed by a flurry of bilateral meetings that stretch long into the day. Obama will hold a meeting with Pope Benedict, who this week called for a re-think of the way the world economy is run.

For more on the summit, click

(Additional reporting by Matthew Tostevin; Writing by Stephen Brown and Crispian Balmer; editing by Ralph Boulton and Janet McBride) – Reuters

A French government minister has reversed earlier claims that a “black box” recorder from a plane that crashed in the Indian Ocean has been found.

French Minister for Co-operation Alain Joyandet said signals picked up by rescuers came from a distress beacon.

Earlier, an official said fforts to retrieve one of the black box recorders would begin during the day.

The plane, flying from the Yemeni capital Sanaa to the Comoros, came down in bad weather with 153 on board.

Meanwhile doctors say the only survivor of the crash, teenage girl Baya Bakari, is recovering and in no danger.

There were 66 French nationals among the passengers. Most of the rest were Comorans.

Most of the passengers had flown on a different Yemenia aircraft from Paris or Marseille before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.

Most aircraft have a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder.

“The Transall (military plane) that picked up an acoustic signal did not, despite what was said this morning, detect the beacons of the flight recorders, but rather what appear to be its distress beacons,” Mr Joyandet said in Moroni, the Comoros capital, AFP news agency reported.

‘Still hope’

A French vessel has been sent to the site to start recovery operations, she added. French rescue teams are already involved in the search for survivors.

Apart from the 14-year-old girl found alive, no-one from the plane has been confirmed alive, and rescuers say chances of finding more survivors are slim.

AFP news agency quoted hospital sources in the Comoros capital Moroni as saying they were preparing to receive another child survivor, but Mr Joyandet later said no more survivors had been found.

Sources close to the Comoran rescue team say the only confirmed survivor, who has been named as Baya Bakari, was being treated in Moroni and her condition had improved.

The Associated Press news agency quoted her father as saying she had been travelling with her mother to the Comoros from Paris to visit family.

Kassim Bakari said she had been ejected from the plane when it came down and clung to debris for several hours until she was rescued.

“She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that,” he said, describing her as “fragile” and barely able to swim.

He added that he was mourning the loss of his wife whilst overjoyed at his daughter’s extraordinary escape.

Doctors at the hospital said she had cuts to her face and a fractured collarbone, but was not in danger.

“She is very calm given the shock she suffered,” surgeon Ben Imani told Reuters.

Angry protest

The French transport ministry had earlier said the Airbus 310 plane which crashed had been banned from France because of “irregularities”.

But Yemenia responded by criticising “false information and speculation about technical problems” on the plane.

Several Comoran expatriates angry with what they see as the poor state of the company’s aircraft tried to stop passengers from checking in for another Yemenia flight leaving Paris Charles de Gaulle airport for Sanaa.

About 60 people failed to check in, reports said, but it was not clear how many did so as a result of the protest.

The crash was the second involving an Airbus aircraft in recent weeks. On 1 June an Air France Airbus 330 travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board. – BBC

Airbus 310 crashes off Comoros with 142 passengers, 11 crew; child rescued from crash site.

A five-year-old child has been found alive, hours after a Yemeni airliner crashed in the Indian Ocean with more than 150 people on board.

Some bodies have also been recovered from the wreckage of the plane.

A passenger jet from Yemen with 153 people on board crashed in the Indian Ocean early Tuesday as it tried to land during heavy wind on the island nation of Comoros, and search teams rescued a child from the sea, officials said.

There were 142 passengers and a crew of 11 Yemenis on board when the Airbus A310, which had set off from the Yemeni capital of San’a, went down shortly before landing in Moroni, on the main island of Grand Comore, Yemeni civil aviation deputy chief Mohammed Abdul Qader said.

Most of the passengers were from Comoros, returning from Paris. Those on board included families with children and there were at least three babies on the flight, he added. France said 66 on board were French nationals.

Comoros immigrations officer, Rachida Abdullah, told The Associated Press that a child was rescued from the sea. She said that three bodies have also been retrieved, along with debris from the plane, but that no other survivors have been recovered so far.

Abdul Qader, the Yemeni official, said the child was 5 years old. He said it was too early to speculate on the reasons for the crash, adding that the flight data recorder hadn’t been found.

“The weather was very bad … the wind was very strong,” he said, adding the windy conditions hampered rescue efforts. Abdul Qader said wind speed was 40 miles per hour (61 kilometers per hour) as the plane was landing.

Gen. Bruno de Bourdoncle de Saint-Salvy, the senior commander for French forces in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Airbus 310 crashed in deep waters about 8 nautical miles (9.2 miles) north from the Comoran coast and 18 nautical miles (21 miles) from the Moroni airport.

And on the Indian Ocean island of Ile de la Reunion, an official statement from the French prefecture said the crash occurred at 02:50 GMT Tuesday (10:50 p.m. EDT Monday).

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said French aviation and naval support was heading to help in search operations at the Comoros government’s request.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy “expressed his deep emotion” about the accident and asked the French military to help in the rescue operation, particularly from the French islands of Mayotte and Reunion, according to a statement from his office.

Kouchner expressed “sincere condolences” and said the French Embassy in Moroni was “fully mobilized” to help families. The French junior minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, is heading Tuesday to Moroni, the statement said.

The Comoros is an archipelago of three main islands situated about 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometer) south of Yemen, between Africa’s southeastern coast and Madagascar.

Christophe Prazuck, French military spokesman, says that patrol boat, the Rieuse and fregate Nivose, a reconnaissance ship, were being sent to crash site as well as Transall, a military transport plane. The French were sending divers as well as medical personnel on the plane, he said.

In Paris, a crisis cell was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport. Most of the passengers on board were from the French city of Marseille, which has a large Comoros community.

Another crisis cell has been established in Marseille, according to Stephane Salord, the consul general of the Comoros in the Provence-Alps-Cote d’Azur region of France.

“There is considerable dismay,” Salord said. “These are families that, each year on the eve of summer, leave Marseille and the region to rejoin their families in the Comoros and spend their holidays.”

In France, this week is the start of annual summer school vacations.

An Airbus statement said the plane that crashed went into service 19 years ago, in 1990, and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It has been operated by Yemenia (Yemen Airways) since 1999.

Airbus identifies the plane’s serial number as 535, and said it was sending a team of specialists to the Comoros.

The A310-300 is a twin-engine widebody jet that can seat up to 220 passengers. There are 214 A310s in service worldwide with 41 operators.

France’s transport minister Dominique Bussereau said French aviation inspectors found a “number of faults” during a 2007 inspection of the plane. He told France’s i-Tele television that the Airbus A310 was inspected by France’s civil aviation agency DGAC and “they noticed a certain number of faults.”

On May 31, an Airbus A330 operated by Air France ran into thunderstorms after leaving Brazil and crashed into the Atlantic. Fifty-one bodies were recovered from that flight, which was carrying 228 people.

Associated Press Writers Deborah Seward and Angela Charlton in Paris, Sarah El Deeb in Cairo and Yoann Guilloux in Saint-Denis de la Reunion, Reunion Island, contributed to this report. – ABC News, BBC

Lobby group Human Rights Watch has accused Zimbabwe’s army of using forced labour, including children, to mine diamonds in the east of the country.

Local villagers who do not co-operate with the military are beaten and tortured, the US-based group says.

Their report also details an alleged massacre of diamond diggers last year, after the disputed elections.

It urges the unity government to take control of the mines and use the revenue to help rebuild the country.

“Zimbabwe’s new government should get the army out of the fields, put a stop to the abuse,” Human Rights Watch’s Africa director Georgette Gagnon said.

“The police and army have turned this peaceful area into a nightmare of lawlessness and horrific violence,” she said.

‘Buying off the military’

The report is based on interviews done in February in Marange district.

Its researchers say that as far as they are aware, the situation has not changed since the former opposition joined the government four months ago.

Human Rights Watch claims control of the mines is part of a systematic attempt by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party to buy support from the military.

The diamond fields in Marange were seized just one month after the power-sharing deal was first agreed in September 2008.

On the face of it, the military takeover was an attempt to seize control from unlicensed miners, the lobby group says.

But in reality it was a systematic attempt to enable key army units, whose support President Mugabe needed following June’s elections, to have access to riches, Human Rights Watch says.

“Documents that we reviewed that we got from the military and the police clearly indicate that this was a clearly designed system to benefit the army,” researcher Dewa Mavhinga said.

Witnesses say it involved a brutal military operation that saw some 200 people killed in three weeks.

It says army brigades are still in control forcing hundreds of children and adults endure forced labour for mining syndicates.

While the new Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is touring the West lobbying for aid, “millions of dollars in potential government revenue are being siphoned off through illegal diamond mining, smuggling of gemstones… and corruption”, the rights organisation says.

If the diamond industry was legally regulated, Human Rights Watch estimates it could amount to $200m a month for the country.

It is calling for diamond exports from Zimbabwe to be banned and for the country to be suspended from the Kimberly Process – the certification scheme for diamonds – until the demilitarisation of the mines is achieved.

On Wednesday, Global Witness reported that the Kimberly process was failing – partly because of the situation in Zimbabwe. – BBC