The United States Government says it will not recognize Kenya's opposition Leader, Raila Odinga as the President of Kenya after he declared himself the People's president this week. The US Department of State made this known in a statement issued on Friday. The statement said the US is gravely concerned by Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga’s self-“inauguration” on Tuesday as Kenya’s ‘People’s President’.

An opposition party in Zimbabwe says its leader and several other party members were attacked today.

The National People's Party leader says Joice Mujuru and others were assaulted with rocks as they tried to hold a political rally.

Joice Mujuru, a former vice-president for governing Zanu-PF, is challenging her former party for the presidency.

Paleoanthropologists unearthed human fossils that suggest the species left Africa at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.The fossil of a part of a mouth and accompanying teeth are estimated to be up to 194,000 years old. They were discovered during an excavation at Mount Carmel, Israel, a new study shows.

The 955 mine workers who spent more than a day trapped underground in Sibanye Gold Ltd.’s Beatrix mine in South Africa following a power failure are all safely back on the surface. A severe storm on Wednesday night collapsed power lines supplying the mine, located in South Africa’s Free State province, and caused a surge and outage at all three of the shafts, Sibanye said in a statement Friday morning.

About 950 workers are trapped underground in a gold mine in South Africa after a storm caused a power cut and blocked their way out.

Without electricity, the lifts could not bring night shift workers to the surface, but they "appear to be fine", a spokesman for their employer said.

He said about 65 miners have so far been rescued and all are accounted for.

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has provided arguments on why he should not be prosecuted for corruption, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Thursday, as pressure mounts for the scandal-plagued president to step down. Zuma, who has faced and denied numerous corruption allegations since taking office, submitted documents on Wednesday night to the NPA providing reasons why 783 counts of corruption relating to a 30 billion rand ($2 billion) arms deal arranged in the late 1990s should not be reinstated.