WASHINGTON – Delaware Senator Joe Biden is Barack Obama’s choice to be his vice presidential running mate, NBC News has confirmed.

Biden, who has served in the Senate since being elected at the age of 29, is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and will add his foreign policy expertise to the Democratic ticket.

MOGADISHU, Somalia (CNN) — Heavy shelling struck Somalia’s capital city on Thursday, leaving pools of blood around a neighborhood mosque, a devastated market and 11 civilians dead, according to witnesses and a local journalist.

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States on Wednesday suspended a program aimed at reuniting refugees from mainly East Africa with relatives in the United States after DNA testing revealed rampant fraud. More on US suspends refugee program after DNA fraud

In these past three months MSF has cared for 20,800 patients suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Most of these patients have been treated in one of of 51 ambulatory centres where they get a medical consultation and go home with weekly rations of therapeutic food. Families are also given food support rations made up of a corn and soya blend with oil and sugar.

It was at a railway crossing near Diri Dawa, the provincial capital in the Ethiopian Ogaden desert, that I saw them: small children’s hands, blackened by sun, clutching at the slats of a cattle truck dumped on a siding. The year was 1984, the height of the Ethiopian famine that claimed about a million lives. These young things must have expired, hours later, of heat and thirst in temperatures peaking at about 48C, in the truck where they had deliberately been left to die. More on Ethiopia – another famine, another avoidable disaster

 Five people are reported to have been killed and at least 17 people wounded after Ethiopian forces fired mortar shells close to Mogadishu’s main market, witnesses said.Mohamud Hussein, a mini-bus driver who witnessed Tuesday’s attack, said: “Three mortar shells landed in Bakara market and hit traders and customers.”

Like crops, the children are weighed (in a nylon harness seat attached to a scale) and measured (with a tape to record arm circumference). The most severely malnourished are kept overnight for up to a month; the rest go home with a week’s supply of Plumpy’nut, a nutritional paste.

GONDAR, Ethiopia – Sitting in a leaky, flyblown hut, a few dozen Ethiopian villagers are anxiously waiting to be transported to another world.

They have just been given word that their years of waiting are over, and that soon they will make a 2,000-mile journey by land and air with what is probably the last wave of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel.

ETHIOPIA’s Kenenisa Bekele successfully defended his Olympic 10,000m title in a competition record time early today, leading teammate Sileshi Sihine in an Ethiopian 1-2. Bekele hit the front 450m from the finish and crossed in 27 minutes, 1.17 seconds to beat the record he set four years ago.

Delegations from Somalia’s interim government and opposition groups are meeting in Djibouti Saturday for United Nations brokered peace talks.

Two explosions along the road to the airport outside the Somali capital, Mogadishu, Friday briefly delayed President Abdullahi Yousuf and Prime Minister Hussein Nur Adde as they prepared to fly to the meeting. More on Djibouti Hosts Somalia Peace Talks