A South African jewelry firm was surprised to find that one of their own staff had been stuffing a cooked chicken with gold and precious metal in an attempt to steal the goods. Carrying the cooked chicken out of the building on his way home, the man was stopped at the metal detector with chicken in hand. This is when security officials discovered that instead of being stuffed with sage and onion, the chicken had been stuffed with expensive jewelry.

Thomas Tomczyk is serious about motorcycles. He's done three motorcycle trips across India, from the steamy southern tip all the way up to the frozen highlands of Ladakh. Now he's starting his childhood dream--an epic trip 12,500 miles (20,000 km) across Africa. His zigzag tour will take in 22 African nations including South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, the Saharawi Republic, and Morocco. . .

In a grimy cell in Kisangani prison, Joshua French, a former British soldier, sits on a plastic chair, an electric fan stirring the humid air above his head. Groups of soldiers and police with AK47s loll about outside the jail — a red-brick fortress in the heart of this bombed-out tropical city by the Congo River. Open sewers pass around the perimeter of a large courtyard lined with stinking, mosquito-ridden cells. French, 27, who has dual British and Norwegian nationality, and his friend, Tjostolv Moland, 28, a former Norwegian soldier, face death by firing squad after a military tribunal convicted them of murder and espionage in September.

Africa’s infamous “dogs of war” may still be going strong, but it seems the rewards of the mercenary life aren’t quite what they used to be. Only this month, Britain’s Simon Mann won a pardon for his part in a foiled 2004 coup attempt on Equatorial Guinea, an old-style adventure whose glittering prize was the central African state’s multi-billion-dollar oil riches.

Timbuktu and northern Mali have long been attractive to adventure travelers, but now the United Kingdom is warning Westerners not to go there for fear of terror attacks. The travel advisory, which you can read here, states that the provinces north of the River Niger, including Timbuktu, are the operating grounds for the terror group Al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Magreb. On January 22 of this year they kidnapped a group of Western tourists near the Mali-Niger border and later murdered a British national. The advisory also warns that two popular festivals, The Festival in the Desert and Sahara Nights, are in the danger zone and should be avoided.

Seven Papua New Guinean men have been rescued after spending more than two months adrift in the Pacific Ocean after their boat ran out of fuel. The group was spotted drifting near the island of Nauru by a helicopter belonging to US fishing vessel Ocean Encounter on Sunday. Seven men were onboard and told Ocean Encounter captain Ben Maughan they left Tabar Island in the New Ireland area of Papua New Guinea on September 14 to return home to Lihir Island, a distance of about 30 miles.

Somewhere in the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds — even though the planet has more than enough food for all. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out this sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security Monday in Rome. “Today, more than 1 billion people are hungry,” he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year — 17,000 every day, he said. The summit opened with the leaders adopting a declaration to renew their commitment to eradicating hunger. They promised to do so by promoting investment, reversing the decline in funding for agriculture and tackling the effect of global warming on food security. Urgent action is critical, Ban said.

Joshua Basso, a 29-year-old Tampa man was jailed after he allegedly placed a series of obscene calls to 911 operators - Asking dispatchers to talk to him while he masturbated. According to Tampa police, Basso called 911 four times late Tuesday morning and sexually harassed a female operator. Basso asked the women about her breasts and requested that she have sex with him - while informing her that he was masturbating while on the phone.

Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF. The vast majority are in Asia and Africa: more than 90 percent of children with stunted growth live on those two continents. "Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow," said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.

A newly discovered dinosaur species that roamed the Earth about 200 million years ago may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land, scientists in South Africa said Wednesday. The Aardonyx celestae was a 23-foot- (7-met...

As the children's show Sesame Street celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, premiering its new season today, one cute and cuddly Muppet on its South African edition continues to help combat and raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. While Sesame Street is seen in over 140 countries, each version addresses local issues and has different Muppets. Golden-yellow Kami made her debut on the South African Sesame Street co-production, called Takalani Sesame, in 2002 in response to the country's HIV/AIDS problem.

It is often said that the children are those who pay the price for the errors of adults. It is also evident that the same applies to the events in Zimbabwe. A journalist from the BBC visited the Family Support Trust Clinic and interviewed one of the ...

Some say yes, calling foreign aid a form of neo-colonialism that does not alleviate poverty, but in fact perpetuates it. I had a particularly privileged friend during high...

A British woman who is being held by Somali pirates with her husband after their yacht was hijacked said in a phone call broadcast Friday that the couple were "bearing up" and she described her captors as "very hospitable." Rachel Chandler told her brother, Stephen Collett, in a telephone call broadcast by ITV News that she is fine.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced this week that it will return a fragment of Egyptian sculpture to its homeland. Unlike the bust of Nefertiti or the recently returned frescoes that the Louvre gave up, the Egyptians weren't calling for its return for months or years. In fact, the Met bought the item from a collector with the specific intent of repatriating it. The move is being seen as an olive branch offered by the Met's new director Thomas Campbell, and another victory for Egyptian head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass, who's been getting tough with museums who own stolen Egyptian artifacts.

British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler have been on an around the world cruise aboard their ship the Lynn Rival for some time now, and they've even been blogging about their adventures on this website. But last Friday, the couple went missing, and their online tracking system failed to send any new updates, while the ship was off the coast of Somalia, an area that has become infamous for its pirate activity. The last known message from the couple was an ominous sounding blog update that simply says: "PLEASE RING SARAH".

THE internet is alive with news that 112-year-old Ahmed Muhamed Dore has married Safia Abdulleh, age 17, in the Galguduud region of Somalia. Says Dore: “Today God helped me realise my dream… I didn’t force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love, and then we agreed to marry.”

Roman Catholic bishops called on corrupt Catholic leaders in Africa on Friday to repent or resign for giving the continent and the Church a bad name. Around 200 African bishops, along with dozens...

High rates of illiteracy are often presented as a proof of what many observers describe as an archaic and unfair education system that, 50 years after independence, failed to live up to the...

But 25 years after Michael Buerk's broadcasts from Ethiopia's 1984 famine, Miss Birhan said the kind of food handouts which once kept her alive are today failing Africa's poorest. "Twenty-five years ago, my life was saved by Irish nursing sisters who gave me an injection, and food from organisations like Band Aid," said Birhan Woldu, now 28.