Three internally displaced children died and four others were injured when a rusty grenade they were playing with exploded in their hands on Sunday.

Millions of civilians were displaced during more than two decades of civil war in Sudan. Now, three years after the North and South signed a peace accord, many are returning home, including tens of thousands of Southern Sudanese who had

Adan Malin Omar, 78, who fought for Somalia's independence from Italy in the 1950s, survived the 16-year civil war and did not leave his home in the Abdiaziz district of north Mogadishu, even at the height of the violence.

Northern Uganda has enjoyed relative peace following years of clashes between government troops and rebels, but the prevalence of illegal weapons across the region poses a new challenge to displaced civilians returning to their villages, officials said.

Clarisse Larlombaye was nearly ruined when a herd of cows got into her rice field one night.

Widowed mother-of-five Albertine Madwan is among hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) facing an often difficult homecoming to Ituri, a district in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ravaged by inter-ethnic clashes in recent years.

There is still no word on the whereabouts of eight people who went missing, following Sunday night's attack on refugees at a camp in Ruwa.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has sent a report from the chief mediator between the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels to the Security Council on efforts to resolve their long-running conflict.

Steps towards bringing peace to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and bolstering lawful Government bodies must gather speed, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote in his latest report on the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country, known as