JUBA (Reuters) - The United Nations has sent a contingent of peacekeepers to an area of central South Sudan where about 80 people have been killed in a bout of fighting between two ethnic communities, the the U.N. and a local official said on Tuesday.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - At least 23 people were killed and 45 injured when fire broke out after a gas tanker exploded at a ceramics factory in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Tuesday, a district police chief said.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A leading South African trade union on Tuesday called on the government to drop a requirement that buyers of the country's arms exports agree to inspections, a measure that is holding up shipments to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N. food agency said on Tuesday it was procuring 240,000 tonnes of food assistance to deliver to 4.1 million people in Zimbabwe where food shortages are being exacerbated by runaway inflation and drought induced by climate change.

PARIS (Reuters) - President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on Monday to 13 French soldiers killed in Mali last week and vowed no respite in the fight against Islamist militants in the region.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's late former leader Robert Mugabe left behind $10 million in the bank and some properties in the capital, but there is no will naming his beneficiaries, a list of his estate published by state-owned newspaper the Herald

TUNIS (Reuters) - Clashes erupted on Monday between protesters and Tunisian police who fired tear gas to disperse them in the southern town of Jelma, the third consecutive night of protest against poverty and lack of opportunity, witnesses said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. jury on Monday cleared a lead salesman for a Lebanese shipbuilding company of charges that he helped to defraud U.S. investors in bonds backed by the Mozambican government.

WINDHOEK (Reuters) - Two former ministers and four others implicated in Namibia's biggest corruption scandal will remain in police custody until Feb. 20 after their lawyers abandoned their bail application on Monday, the prosecuting authority said.