LONDON (Reuters) - Swiss federal prosecutors have found oil trader Gunvor Group criminally liable for corruption in Congo Republic and Ivory Coast, ordering it to pay almost 94 million Swiss francs ($94.8 million), the Swiss Attorney General's Office said on Thursday.

SFAX, Tunisia (Reuters) - It only took 10 minutes for Fakher Hmidi to slip out of his house, past the cafes where unemployed men spend their days, and reach the creek through the mud flats where a small boat would ferry him to the migrant ship heading from Tunisia to Italy.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa has started discussions with power producers to try to get cheaper electricity from some older renewable energy projects and give the economy a boost, several participants in the talks say.

RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco's king has pardoned Hajar Raissouni, a journalist sentenced to a year in prison last month for extramarital sex and an abortion, along with her fiance, a doctor and two of his colleagues, the justice ministry said on Wednesday.

Juba (Reuters) - Peace talks between key rebel groups and the Sudanese government hit an obstacle on Wednesday when one major group said it will not sit down for direct talks with Khartoum until its demands are met.

KATSINA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Police freed about 500 men and boys from an Islamic school in northern Nigeria on Wednesday, many of whom had been chained to walls, molested and beaten, police sources said.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African power utility Eskom warned of a second day of power cuts on Thursday citing a number of generating units still out of service.

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Keeping girls in schools in Africa is key to lowering the fast-growing continent's high fertility rates and ultimately ending hunger and poverty, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs said Wednesday.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta is due to open a new $1.5 billion Chinese rail line on Wednesday linking the capital Nairobi to the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, despite delays in establishing an industrial park there to drive freight traffic.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's state power firm Eskom said it will cut up to 2,000 megawatts of power from the national grid on Wednesday due to a shortage of generating capacity.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia postponed by a week a referendum on self-determination for its ethnic Sidama community that would have created the country's 10th autonomous region, Fana news agency reported on Tuesday.

ASUTSUARE, Ghana, Oct 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Ephraim Kofi Kenney does not like to work in the fields scaring pests away. But today he must.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A group of Russian journalists who investigated the activities of a secretive group of Russian mercenaries in Africa and the Middle East have been subject to a campaign of physical threats and harassment, their editor-in-chief said.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Central African Republic topped an annual world hunger index on Tuesday as aid agencies warned that climate change was making it increasingly hard to feed the world.

DAKAR (Reuters) - Former Ivory Coast rebel leader Guillaume Soro has announced he will run in next year's presidential election, a vote seen as a major test of stability in the West African country after two civil wars this century.

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Four unidentified bodies have been found in Congo amid the wreckage of a plane that had been carrying staff of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, the government said on Tuesday.

KANO, Nigeria (Reuters) - Hundreds of captives who were beaten, abused and held in squalid conditions at a purported Islamic school in northern Nigeria escaped prior to a raid this week, police said on Tuesday.

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's public sector unions said on Tuesday they were unable to go to work because of soaring prices, adding to the government's problems as it struggles to revive the economy.

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Four unidentified bodies have been found in Congo among the wreckage of a plane that had been carrying staff of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, the government said on Tuesday.

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Uganda will not impose the death penalty for gay sex, a presidential spokesman said on Monday, after major aid donors said they were monitoring a plan by the African nation to reintroduce a bill colloquially known as "Kill the Gays".