Somalia’s president reinstated Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke and his cabinet on Thursday after days of uncertainty following a parliamentary vote of no confidence in them. President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed asked Mr Sharmarke and his ministers to step down after the vote on Sunday. A total 280 MPs had chosen to sack them, according to former speaker Sheikh Aden Madobe, who has since resigned.

The hijacking of merchant ships by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden has been widely condemned in UN resolutions and news reports, yet illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and the dumping of nuclear and toxic waste in Somali waters by foreign fleets continues to be ignored, writes Andrew Mwangura, in an overview of the origins and scale of piracy in the region.

Somali media took another heartbreaking blow with the murder of a Radio Mogadishu journalist last week, report the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), the Eastern Africa Journalists Association (EAJA) and other IFEX members. Just one day after World Press Freedom Day, on 4 May, gunmen abducted and killed the journalist; he had worked for a station managed by the Transitional Federal Government.

Prompted by a rapidly deteriorating situation and growing displacement in Somalia UNHCR is seeking additional funds to ease the plight of Somali refugees in neighbouring Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti and those forcibly displaced inside their country. The two supplementary appeals being launched in Geneva address the increasing needs in Somalia and four neighbouring countries as well as the extension of the Ifo camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Including an additional US$ 60 million being sought today, UNHCR's overall budgetary needs in Somalia and its four neighbouring countries in 2010 presently amount to US$ 424.7 million. So far this year, UNHCR has received 36 percent of its global comprehensive needs budget.

Heavy shelling rocked Somalia’s capital today, killing 15 people and wounding dozens, as rebels fired mortars at the country’s lawmakers meeting for the first time this year, medics said amid a chaotic session that saw the Speaker ousted.

In the face of a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation, the United Nations refugee agency has called for increased funding to help those displaced both inside and outside Somalia. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), made the appeals on Wednesday, as the UN Security Council was meeting in an open session at the UN headquarters in New York to discuss the current situation in Somalia.

The chairman of Jubbaland Independent Journalists Association (JIJA) Mr. Ali Yasin Gurbe together with all the other members of this association hereby send an obituary to the family and friends of the slain famous Somali Journalist in Mogadishu Mr. Sheikh Noor Mohamed Abkey. Abkey was a senior journalist and had a reputation within the Somali journalists. Indeed, we shall miss him. Also the Somali people will miss his noble service. We are also very worried of the ever increasing persecution against the Somali journalists. May Allah rest his soul in eternal peace.

At least 14 civilians have been killed during a battle between government soldiers and al-Qaeda-linked fighters, witnesses say. Tuesday's clashes followed a separate suicide car bomb attack in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, by al-Shabab fighters on the base of African Union peacekeepers.

The top United Nations envoy to Somalia today appealed to members of the nation’s Parliament to put aside their infighting and to instead focus on meeting the population’s needs and bolstering security. “I am following, with great unease, the unhelpful debate about parliamentary issues now taking place in Mogadishu,” Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said in a press release.

The Somali Journalist Rights Agency (SOJRA) concerns the desperate pleading for help from the prominent and well respected Somali journalist who is currently in exile in Athens, the capital of Greece. A journalist Mohamud Mohamed Hallane, who is well known in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and in lower Shabelle region contacted SOJRA on Thursday April 29th, 2010 and requested for help while he faced an unkind condition during his dash for freedom.

After graduating from a teacher training college in Kenya thanks to a United Nations-backed scholarship scheme, three Somali men are returning to the refugee camp they grew up in to help the next generation of children. Aden Yusef Mohamed, Ahmed Aden Hasa and Hish Mohamed Maow ranked in the top 20 among the 500 students they graduated from the two-year programme at the Nakuru Teachers Training College.

Participants to this week's international meeting on Somalia should press for an immediate end to abuses against civilians by Somalia's transitional government, African Union forces, and armed opposition groups, Human Rights Watch said in an open letter.

UNHCR is shocked by the further loss of civilian lives we've seen from fighting in Mogadishu earlier this week. More than 30 people are reported killed, many of them civilians including children. From local sources we understand that medical facilities are having difficulties coping with the many wounded. Residents have described this week's shelling as among the worst in months.

As more aid groups pull out of camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) and more people flee Mogadishu to escape the violence, the plight of IDPs is at its most extreme, says a doctor-turned-relief-worker in Mogadishu. "[Relief] aid is at its lowest and the need is even greater than at any time," Hawa Abdi, who turned her 26ha property into an IDP camp, told IRIN on 29 March.

"How do Somali communities deal with their need for security and governance in the absence of a state? The reality is that since 1991 numerous Somali-led reconciliation processes have taken place at local and regional levels. Often these have proven more sustainable than the better resourced and better publicized national reconciliation processes sponsored by the international community." Pat Johnson and Abdirahman Raghe in new report from Conciliation Resources and Interpeace

Attacks on rebels by government troops and African Union peacekeepers in Somalia kill and injure many civilians and should be much more discriminate, human rights group Amnesty International said on Thursday. Islamist rebels have been fighting the Horn of Africa state's fragile government since the start of 2007. African Union's (AU) force AMISOM is supporting the U.N.-backed administration, which controls just parts of the capital, Mogadishu.

Somali government forces have destroyed some 500 homes near the main airport in Mogadishu, capital of the lawless and war-torn nation, Somalia, because of security concerns. About 1000 displaced people, who were demolished their houses on Thursday, are homeless and sitting the open in the Afisoyoni villag

The UN World Food Programme has denied a claim that up to half the food aid to Somalia was being diverted to Islamist militants and corrupt contractors. WFP officials said there was no evidence to back up the claim made in a report by a UN monitoring group.

Managing camps for displaced people is usually a complex business involving aid agencies, governments and elaborate coordination mechanisms. Not in Somalia, however, where years of violence have forced hundreds of thousands of people to take refuge in remote camps that are largely inaccessible to agencies or the authorities.

One minute Halimo Mohamed, 40, was at home with her children, the next she was on the move, fleeing violence in Somalia's capital, after her Karan neighbourhood, in north Mogadishu, was hit by a barrage of shells, killing dozens and destroying homes, including hers. After dodging militia, struggling to find food and sometimes being forced to walk, she and three of her five children finally arrived on 17 March at Dadaab, a refugee camp in northern Kenya.