Nairobi - Two men on Monday pleaded guilty to illegal ivory possession in Kenya after they being arrested in one of East Africa's biggest seizures in recent years, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said.

Paul Udoto, spokesman for KWS, said the two men - a Kenyan and a Tanzanian - were arrested with 512 kilograms of elephant tusks near the Kenyan-Tanzania border on Saturday.

Nairobi - Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has warned that new elections may be the only way to solve an ever-widening rift in the coalition government formed early in 2008 to end the post-election violence that ripped the county apart. Odinga is battling Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka for control of government business in parliament.

Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) says the constitution gave the president the right to appoint Musyoka as the head of government business.

Odingai is furious, believing it is part of attempts to sideline him.

Nairobi/Dakar - The international lobby group Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday warned that the military in Guinea was escalating the number of human rights abuses against civilians. The west African state has been in flux since the death of long- serving president Lansana Conte last December, after which the army seized power and suspended the constitution.

Nairobi  - The jeep bumps along a dusty track, its occupants peering out into the long grass, studded with the occasional Acacia tree, that carpets the open plain as far as the eye can see.

Scores of wildebeest, zebra and impala feed contentedly across the plain as the sun reaches the end of its long trek down the sky.

Suddenly a finger points and the jeep shudders to a halt. There, emerging from the grass, comes a solitary lioness.

Nairobi - A French warship delivered 11 Somalis accused of piracy to the Kenyan port of Mombasa on Wednesday as the trial of another nine suspected pirates apprehended by the German navy got underway in the town.

French commandos from the warships Nivose captured the men last week as they attempted to board the Liberian tanker Safmarine Asia in the Indian Ocean.

The men delivered by the Nivose were immediately taken away by the police and are expected to appear in court on Thursday.

Washington, April 22 : A new study has shown widespread and substantial declines in wildlife in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve in only 15 years.

The study was analyzed by researchers at the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and led and funded by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

It is based on rigorous, monthly monitoring between 1989 and 2003 of seven “ungulate,” or hoofed, species in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, which covers some 1500 square kilometers in southwestern Kenya.