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By MICHAEL DEIBERT When it was announced last month that the ruling party of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi had swept local polls in this vast Horn of Africa nation, few expressed surprise.

decade ago Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki launched a border war in the Horn of Africa that killed 80,000 people.

The opening of Jijiga international Airport yesterday was a milestone for the Somali Regional State. As one of the biggest projects ever undertaken in the Somali region and now, one of the largest Airports in the country, the Jijiga international Airport is expected to open the Somali regional State to the outside world and contribute significantly to the Somali regions short and long term economic vitality. The region which lacks any significant or major projects which normally attract business enterprises is counting on this airport to open up new economic opportunities or at least attract the curiosity of a few adventurous entrepreneurs or business that are willing to relocate into the hot spots of the world which this region qualifies with its history of instability and neglect.

Hillary Clinton won a handsome victory on 13 May 2008 in the Democratic primary election in West Virginia, whose people are among the poorest, most racially homogeneous, and least educated in the United States. But her success there will not erase Barack Obama's lead in delegates secured for the Democratic Party's convention in Denver in August 2008, nor arrest the glacial slide towards her rival's selection as the party's candidate to challenge Senator John McCain in the United States presidential election of 4 November. The series of endorsements Obama has been receiving from the Democrats' "superdelegates", as well as from the former presidential aspirant John Edwards, only reinforces the sense of inevitability about his - eventual - candidature.

At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport last week, I was emerging from a concourse when three electric carts driven by Somali airport workers whizzed past, startling me.

The regime in Ethiopia has been full of contrivance and deception in playing ‘democracy’ more as a game of deception rather than as a principle of governance to find workable arrangements with moral, intellectual and political integrity to solve the age-old governance problems of the country.

When Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, suggested that the British public consider "some accommodation" to Islamic law, and that such an accommodation ultimately was "unavoidable", the response was one of outrage. Yet in most cases, Williams's words were wildly misinterpreted, writes Stephen Jones. When even the most progressive writers about Islam do not denounce the concept of Sharia, would it not be more productive to ask how a symbol that stands for all that is good comes to be used to justify oppression? Could it be that unwillingness to countenance references to the Sharia betrays a reluctance to examine the ethical and moral bases of legal norms in the West?

Once again the USA is walking into Africa spraying kerosene on an open fire. In this case they are compounding the tragedy of Somalia. Specifically, elements in the US government are moving to partition Somalia.

As a political community, Somalia has disintegrated. The country has now reached the limit of its devolutionary cycle, which began in December 2006, when Ethiopia mounted a military intervention that ousted the Islamic Courts Council ( I.C.C.) from control over most of southern and central Somalia. The Courts movement, which sought to institute an Islamic state based on Shari'a law, had provided the first possibility for Somalia's political integration since 1991, when the brutal dictatorship of Siad Barre was overthrown by a divided group of clan-based resistance movements, whose leaders could not or would not agree on a power-sharing formula to keep a political community intact. From then on, Somalia's political community devolved and quickly disintegrated into primary clan-based solidarities protected and exploited by warlords. A similar process has marked the period following the Ethiopian intervention and the fall of the Courts.

Last month, the Pentagon launched the U.S. Africa Command (Africom), spurring debate and showcasing two contrasting worldviews within the United States on how best to pursue its foreign policy objectives. That the United States must engage with Africa is not in question; what causes controversy is the mode and nature of its engagement.