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South Sudanese President Salva Kiir blamed soldiers loyal to his former vice president, Riek Machar, for starting this month's violence.

Tensions have been high in South Sudan since July, when Kiir dismissed Machar and the rest of the Cabinet. The move inflamed tensions between Kiir's Dinka community and Machar's Nuer community.

On Thursday, attackers killed two Indian army peacekeepers, wounded a third, and killed two to 20 of 30 civilians who were seeking refuge at the United Nations' Akobo base, the U.N. said.

South Sudan became the world's newest country when it split from Sudan in July 2011. The split happened after a 2005 peace agreement ended years of civil war between the largely Animist and Christian south and the Muslim-dominated north. The deal led to a January 2011 referendum in which people of the south voted to secede from Sudan.

Mr. Kuon said that government forces were massing to carry out a counterassault, but that the rebels had the strength to hold the strategic city. There was no sign of a cease-fire, he said. “As I’m talking to you right now there is sporadic fighting” in a separate oil-producing state as well, he added.

Diplomats in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, worked to get the two sides talking, with the aim of negotiating a cessation of hostilities before the cycle of violence descended into a full-scale civil war. The Ethiopian foreign minister said that talks were expected to start Thursday morning between delegations of the opposing sides.

David Nash, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan, said it was hard to know how many people had gathered on the riverbank for safety, estimating a total of about 70,000. “As far as we know it’s the biggest displaced-person population in South Sudan,” Mr. Nash said. “So far a big proportion is women and young children, so they’re the most vulnerable.” In cities like Juba and Malakal, civilians have taken refuge on United Nations bases, but the people here in Awerial were spread out in the open along the river. There was little in the way of shelter, and most people were sleeping under trees. As night fell, dozens of small cooking fires sparked to life, and scores of babies wailed into the evening hours.

They say members of Fano, a youth militia loyal to the government, rampaged through Mai-Kadra killing ethnic Tigrayans. The government has repeatedly disputed that narrative, saying it was a youth militia affiliated with the Tigrayan rebels who killed ethnic Amharas, Ethiopia's second-biggest ethnic group.

She says she now feels safe in Sudan but worries about her future and about the bleak living conditions at the camps. Humanitarian workers are struggling to keep up with the flow of refugees and to build up an infrastructure to accommodate them.

In Ethiopia, the situation appears more severe. The United Nations has said that refugees in the Tigray Region have received no aid since conflict started. The more than 96,000 Eritrean refugees in Tigray, who have fled war and repression in the past two decades, the U.N. says, have run out of food rations. The U.N. has received reports that refugees are leaving camps because of violence.

The war is a power struggle between Ethiopia's new government and its old one; it's about what the Ethiopian political system will look like in the future. But in interviews with refugees, the war is about loss. Everyone, no matter which side they're on, is mourning. Some have lost loved ones; many others have lost homes. And every inch of the refugee camps in Sudan has become about grasping at some semblance of what they had before the war.

“We have seen the signs of this already and we do not want to see any development of this nature taking hold in this country, and we have the historical analogies fresh in our minds,” Ms. Johnson said, in a seeming reference to conflicts in Bosnia or Rwanda.

some just five years old, being severely beaten, routinely shackled, and imprisoned without food and water by the sheikhs, or religious men, in charge of the schools

they had been raped or experienced other forms of sexual abuse.

children

Because they charge no fees, many families consider them an alternative to mainstream education, especially in remote villages that may not have government-run schools.

There are nearly 30,000 khalwas across the country

They receive money from the government and private donors both in Sudan and around the world.

Al-Shabab militants also attacked Kenyan peacekeeping troops in Somalia, where the central government in Mogadishu is weak. Al-Shabab, hoping to establish a radical Islamic theocracy, claims it wants Kenyan forces to leave Somalia.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said Kenyan security forces have thwarted numerous al-Shabab terrorism attempts over the years by arresting terror suspects at the Dadaab refugee complex and recovering caches of arms there.

Dadaab and Kakuma are also hotbeds for poaching, human trafficking, illegal arms sales and other criminal activities, he added.

But refugees at the camp say the government is punishing them for the mistakes of others.

Others said they could not afford to leave the camp.

The United States has  joined the United Nations and human rights groups in urging Kenya to rescind its decision to shut down the refugee camps.

Meanwhile, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights urged the international community to help Kenya shoulder the burden of hosting the refugees to avoid closing the camps.

The region is watching one of the biggest crises it has experienced in modern times: the political and economic implosion of Venezuela, which has inflicted violence and hunger on tens of millions of people and caused more than 1 million to flee the country — the largest displacement of people in Latin American history.

Tens of thousands have been killed and more than 2 million driven out of the country; since last year the United Nations has said South Sudan is on the brink of famine.

Forget about an American envoy: Even the senior State Department post for the region has, as elsewhere, no permanent appointee.

The prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, was in Washington last week for a singular purpose: to try to persuade the Trump administration to fill the State Department post of special coordinator for Tibetan issues — which, of course, is vacant.

This U.S. official, he said, has been vital in getting other countries to attend meetings with his government, in channeling aid and in simply forcing China to address Tibet. Without the U.S. representative, he said, “the Tibet issue is not raised.” A little-noticed loss, perhaps, but one of many in a world without U.S. leadership

The Covax distribution plan calls for providing each country with enough vaccine doses for roughly 20 percent of the population. Only after that would countries’ health needs be considered.

Peruvians are at far higher risk right now than Ghanaians of similar age and health — and both are at far higher risk than, say, Canadians or Taiwanese. By ignoring differences in risk between countries, Covax undermines its stated aim of protecting “people most at risk and those most likely to transmit the virus.”

Need should be the principal criterion for distributing vaccines among countries, but not the only one. Before vaccines are sent, countries must be able to distribute and administer them. Vaccinations — not vaccines — are what save lives.

s the global supply of vaccines expands, vaccine manufacturers and nations expecting to have extra doses, including the United States and Britain, must decide which countries to help and how many doses to send to global organizations like Covax.But if Covax’s distribution criteria remain unresponsive to need, countries with spare doses should bypass the organization and distribute them where they will reduce deaths the most.

But to many Palestinians, his likely replacement as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would be no improvement. Mr. Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, and a former settler leader who outright rejects Palestinian statehood.

Yet alongside last month’s deadly 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the worst bout of intercommunal Arab-Jewish violence to have convulsed Israel in decades, these disparate parts suddenly came together in a seemingly leaderless eruption of shared identity and purpose.

Among the Arab minority in Israel, many of whom define themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, the prospect of a new government has divided opinion. While the government would be led by Mr. Bennett, and packed with lawmakers who oppose a Palestinian state, some hoped the presence of three centrist and leftist parties in the coalition, coupled with the likely tacit support of Raam, an Arab Islamist party, might moderate Mr. Bennett’s approach.

The cabinet is expected to include at least one Arab, Esawi Frej, of the left-wing Meretz party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has said he will support the new government only if it grants more resources and attention to the Arab minority. And the likely appointment of a center-left minister to oversee the police force might encourage officers to take a more restrained approach to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, where clashes between the police and protesters played a major role in the buildup to the recent war in Gaza.

Mr. Trump’s administration helped broker a series of historic normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which bypassed the Palestinians and ruptured decades of professed Arab unity around the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinians have been aided by the international awakening and momentum of movements like Black Lives Matter, speaking the language of rights and historical justice, according to experts.

In a measure of the popular excitement about what would have been the first ballot in the occupied territories since 2006, more than 93 percent of eligible Palestinians had registered to vote, and 36 parties with about 1,400 candidates planned to compete for 132 seats in the Palestinian assembly. Nearly 40 percent of the candidates were 40 or younger, according to the Palestinian Central Elections Commission.

Some analysts say they doubt that this recent flash of Palestinian unity will have any immediate, profound impact on the Palestinian reality. But others argue that after years of stagnation, the Palestinian cause is back with a new sense of energy, connectivity, solidarity and activism.

The events of the last few weeks were “like an earthquake,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned Palestinian leader and former senior official. “We are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down or censor it.”

He said more than one million Israelis are descended from those who originally lived in Morocco.

The United Nations and much of the rest of the world refused to affirm Morocco’s claim over the area, and the United States had supported a 1991 cease-fire between the kingdom and the Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front.

After a border incident last month, the Polisario declared war on Morocco, shattering a three-decade cease-fire and threatening a full-blown military conflict in the disputed desert territory in northwest Africa.

The deal is likely to be highly popular in Israel,

By contrast, Sudan has stopped short of declaring full and normalized relations with Israel and recently threatened to withdraw from the agreement if Congress does not give it immunity from terrorism lawsuits that families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks want to bring against the country for harboring Osama bin Laden years before the attacks.

At 2:37 a.m., shortly after entering Egyptian airspace, the plane made a 90-degree turn to the left and then a full circle to the right, first plunging to 15,000 feet from 37,000 feet and then to 9,000 feet

30 were from Egypt, 15 from France, two from Iraq and one each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

American and European officials have expressed concerns about security gaps in North African airports. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Intelligence analysts who monitor jihadist websites and social media said there had been no claims of responsibility by terrorist groups.

At 4:26 a.m. — nearly two hours after the last radar contact — the plane emitted a signal, although it was not clear whether that was an emergency distress signal sent by a crew member or an automated signal from the plane’s onboard computers.

Egypt has come under criticism in the past for its lack of transparency in aviation accidents. In 1999, an EgyptAir flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, killing all 217 on board.

The report also described the global terrorist threat in 2015 as "increasingly decentralized and diffuse," noting that ISIS once again was "the greatest threat globally."

Mr. Just said that he was aware of at least 70 children who have been reunited with their families through the app so far.

In considering his own project, as well as those of his future students, Mr. Just said, “one of the things I kept telling myself, was: you don’t have to ‘change the world’ to change the world.” SaveE-mailSharePrint