MOGADISHU, Somalia – Heavy fighting between Somali insurgents and pro-government troops has killed at least 43 people over two days, as African Union peacekeepers used tanks to help the beleaguered government beat back an insurgent attack, officials said Thursday.

Militants attacking from the north on Wednesday reached to within a mile (2 kilometers) of the presidential place in the heart of the capital, Mogadishu, before African Union peacekeepers in tanks reinforced government troops, residents said.

Ali Muse, the head of Mogadishu’s ambulance service, said he saw 40 bodies lying in the streets over the two days of fighting Wednesday and Thursday. Nearly 150 were wounded, mostly civilians, he said.

“The fighting was heavier than that of yesterday,” said Muse. “Our ambulances are sometimes caught in the crossfire. Our ambulance crews use dangerous streets and they have to dodge mortars and bullets. Sometimes it takes us hours to reach injured civilians and because of that they bleed to death.”

Three of the wounded brought in Wednesday died overnight, said Abdi Mahad, a doctor at Medina Hospital.

Read the whole hot breaking news

MOGADISHU, Somalia – Fighting between Islamist insurgents and government forces killed at least 17 people in the Somali capital on Wednesday, a medical official said.

The head of the Mogadishu ambulance service, Ali Muse, said Wednesday’s fighting also wounded 65 people. The death toll was the highest reported in weeks and most of the dead and wounded were civilians.

Resident Ahmed Ali said the fighting began when al-Shabab insurgents attacked government positions in the north of the city. He said the insurgents briefly overran the government positions but were then pushed back.

A spokesman for the insurgency, Sheik Ali Mohamoud Rage, said that the Islamists had taken two government positions but denied they had been recaptured. Government spokesmen were not immediately available for comment.

There has been an uptick in fighting since the beginning of the year when the government announced plans for an offensive to wrest control of the capital from the Islamists. Fourteen people were killed a week ago when the two sides mortared each other in residential neighborhoods.

Read the whole hot breaking news

According to local lore, Portuguese travelers as far back as the late 19th century suspected oil might lie beneath parts of East Africa after noticing a thick, greasy sediment wash up on the shores of Mozambique. More interested in finding cheap labor, though, the explorers had little use for oil.

A century on, it turns out the Portuguese were right. Seismic tests over the past 50 years have shown countries up the coast of East Africa have natural gas in abundance. Early data compiled by industry consultants also suggest the presence of massive offshore oil deposits. Those finds have spurred oil explorers to start dropping more wells in East Africa, a region they say is an oil and gas bonanza just waiting to be tapped, one of the last great frontiers in the hunt for hydrocarbons. “I and a lot of other people in oil companies working in East Africa have long been convinced that it’s the last real high-potential area in the world that hasn’t been fully explored,” says Richard Schmitt, chief executive of Black Marlin Energy, a Dubai-based East Africa oil prospector. “It seems for a variety of geopolitical reasons more than anything else it’s been neglected over the last several decades. Most of those barriers are currently being lowered or [have] disappeared altogether.” (See pictures of oil in Africa.)

Few have wanted to pay the cost of searching for oil or gas in the region, or risk drilling wells in volatile countries such as Uganda, Mozambique or Somalia. But better technology, lower risk in some of the countries and higher oil prices in recent years have changed the equation. Wildcatters and majors such as Italy’s Eni, Petronas of Malaysia and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) have all moved on East Africa in the past few years.

They’re hoping to mimic London-based Tullow Oil, which discovered some 2 billion barrels of oil in landlocked Uganda over the past four years. Last month, Texas-based oil company Anadarko Petroleum Corp. announced it had just tapped a giant reservoir of natural gas off the coast of Mozambique. “Anadarko’s find went off like a bomb here in Houston,” said Robert Bertagne, a Texas-based oil wildcatter. “It was, ‘Wow, we are finding large quantities of gas and that means we have hydrocarbons in the area.’ Once you have a discovery, more people are going to go in there.” (See pictures of oil fires.)

Much of East Africa’s hopes are focused on a fault line running from Somalia to Madagascar known as the Davie Fracture Zone. It’s there that Bertagne’s analysis – using Cold War–era sea-floor mapping originally intended for use by Soviet submarines – has prompted speculation about oil deposits rivaling those of the North Sea or the Middle East. There’s still a lot that’s just unknown: North Africa has seen 20,000 wells sunk over the past few decades, while drillers have sunk 14,000 wells in and off West Africa. In East Africa the total is about 500 wells.

Read the whole hot breaking news

NAIROBI, Kenya – Fighting between Islamist insurgents and Somali government forces killed five people in the capital on Tuesday, residents said.

Ahmed Dahir Hussein saw three civilians who had been shot lying dead in the street and Mohamud Ali Shobaye says he saw two dead fighters in Mogadishu’s southern Hodan neighborhood.

The government has been promising an offensive against the insurgents for weeks and fighting has recently increased after a few months’ lull.

In a separate incident, four masked gunmen also shot dead an Islamist commander in the capital’s Bakara market, a spokesman for the insurgency said.

It was unclear who killed Barre Ali Barre, head of the military wing of the Party of Islam or Hizbul Islam, said spokesman Sheik Ibrahim Barre Osman.

The group is fighting the government but also has fought against another Islamist group called al-Shabab. The U.S. State Department says al-Shabab has links to al-Qaida.

Read the whole hot breaking news

One of the more famous paintings of the medieval Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for three centuries, is that of a court attendant holding a rope around a giraffe. An inscription on the side says the animal dwelt near “the corners of the western sea, in the stagnant waters of a great morass.” According to legend, the giraffe was found in Africa, along with zebras and ostriches, and brought back with the grand 15th century expeditions of Zheng He, China’s greatest mariner.

More than half a millennium later, Zheng has become a potent symbol for modern China. In 2005, the country marked the 600th anniversary of the seven voyages undertaken between 1405 and 1433 by Zheng’s vast “treasure fleets” with nationwide celebrations; the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing dramatized his explorations from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and the shores of Africa. On Feb. 26, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it was funding a three-year project with the assistance of the Kenyan government to search for Ming-era vessels that had supposedly foundered off the East African coast. “Historical records indicate Chinese merchant ships sank in the seas around Kenya,” Zhang Wei, a curator for a state museum, told China’s official Xinhua news agency. “We hope to find wrecks of the fleet of the legendary Zheng He.” (See pictures of China’s investments in Africa.)

There is more than historical curiosity behind these new efforts. For centuries after his expeditions, Zheng – a Muslim eunuch – slipped out of public awareness, obscured by the rise and fall of new dynasties. Talk of his exploits was revived briefly at the beginning of the 20th century as the fledgling Chinese republic sought to build a navy in the shadow of imperial Japan. But experts say his place as a patriotic national hero has only been truly cemented in the past two decades, in parallel with China’s geopolitical rise – and the growth of its significant economic presence in many African nations and other countries around the Indian Ocean.

The legacy of Zheng’s voyages – involving hundreds of ships, some exponentially larger than the three captained by Christopher Columbus decades later in 1492 – is being invoked by the Chinese as historical proof of the difference between China and the West’s role in the world. Though the unprecedented display of maritime power was meant to extend the Ming dynasty’s reach over a network of tributary states, Zheng rarely resorted to the type of violent, coercive measures taken by European colonizers for centuries, especially in Africa. “Zheng’s a nominal symbol of China’s peaceful engagement with the world,” says Geoffrey Wade, a historian at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore who has translated Ming records pertaining to the voyages. “With him, it’s like the Chinese have an ambassador of friendship – a sign that they aren’t going to hurt anybody.” (See pictures of the making of modern China.)

In recent years, though, Beijing has come under criticism for an approach to Africa that is arguably more bloodless than it is cuddly. China’s support of autocratic regimes from Zimbabwe to Sudan – where Beijing effectively built up an oil industry from scratch – has exposed the Asian giant to accusations of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses as it goes about securing natural resources and political influence. China has pumped billions of dollars into infrastructure projects throughout the continent, tying up key contracts in resource-rich states like Angola and the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

Read the whole hot breaking news