JOHANNESBURG, July 31 (Reuters) - South African department chain Woolworths has pulled the plug on its Ghanaian business after closing its two stores there, in a second retreat from West Africa.

MAPUTO (Reuters) - Mozambique's President Filipe Nyusi will sign a peace agreement on Thursday to put a formal end to military hostilities with the main opposition party, Renamo, almost three decades after the end of a civil war.

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria's interim president fired the justice minister on Wednesday and named the Algiers public prosecutor to replace him, the presidency said, amid a series of corruption investigations involving allies of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

ROME (Reuters) - The European Union ended a standoff with Italy over African immigration on Wednesday, agreeing to take 116 asylum-seekers rescued at sea last week but denied permission to go ashore by the country's right-wing interior minister.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The interim CEO of Kenya's top telecoms operator Safaricom said on Wednesday he would focus on expanding the firm's mobile financial services business M-Pesa beyond Kenya.

TUNIS (Reuters) - Tunisia's liberal prime minister, Youssef Chahed, will run for president in an early election expected on Sept. 15, his Tahaya Tounes party said on Wednesday, making him one of the likely frontrunners to succeed Beji Caid Essebsi, who died last week.

KAFR AL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Security forces detained Lotfy Ibrahim, a young construction worker, as he left a mosque near his home on the Nile Delta in the spring of 2015. When his family finally saw him again nearly three months later, he was in jail, looking badly brutalized.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - The African Union's mediator for Sudan called on Wednesday for a speedy trial for those responsible for killing school children at a protest in the city of El-Obeid.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State said via its Amaq news agency that it killed or wounded more than 40 soldiers in the northeast Nigerian state of Borno in two separate attacks on Tuesday.

JOHANNESBURG - Among the metal shacks and narrow side streets of South Africa's townships, one of the country's biggest lenders sees a sizeable market it wants to be first to crack: multi-million-rand businesses operating largely in cash.

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - A second case of Ebola was detected on Tuesday in the eastern Congolese city of Goma, a local health official said, increasing concern the virus could establish a foothold in the densely populated area close to the Rwandan border.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's central bank on Wednesday sought to raise 30 million Zimbabwe dollars ($3.27 million) at its first public auction of treasury bills since 2012.