Women in Somali city must cover up or go to jail

Women in Somalia’s third-largest city, Baidoa, have been ordered to wear Islamic dress starting this week or face jail time, according to a resident and Somali media reports. The order — issued last week by Al-Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia that controls the city — also warns business owners to close their shops during daily prayers, or they will be temporarily shut down, a local journalist said.

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Spotting Distant Worlds from the Backyard

It was arguably the biggest news in science this month: A graduate student in Australia discovered the continent of Africa. What makes Sally Langford’s discovery so remarkable — and worthy of reporting in the journal Astrobiology on April 6 — is not what she saw, but how she saw it. Once a month over the course of three years, Langford stood huddled against the evening chill in lonely Australian farmland and watched as the east coast of Africa shone in the midday sun

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How Somalia’s Fishermen Became Pirates

Amid the current media frenzy about Somali pirates, it’s hard not to imagine them as characters in some dystopian Horn of Africa version of Waterworld. We see wily corsairs in ragged clothing swarming out of their elusive mother ships, chewing narcotic khat while thumbing GPS phones and grappling hooks.

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