Kenya Burns, Death Toll Soars

Protests erupted in western Kenya and machete-wielding mobs faced off in the Rift Valley on Monday after scores of people were killed in ethnic violence, complicating mediation by former U.N. boss Kofi Annan.
In the normally peaceful Rift Valley town of Nakuru, a mortuary worker said on Monday that 64 bodies were lying in the morgue, all victims of the past four days of ethnic fighting.
Gangs from rival communities have been fighting each other with machetes, clubs, and bows and arrows in Nakuru and nearby Naivasha, both famous for their lakes teeming with wildlife.
In the worst incident of the latest flare-up, 19 people were burned to death locked inside a house in Naivasha on Sunday, police officer Grace Kakai told Reuters.

For all its economic might, the European Union is still widely seen as a
geopolitical lightweight, and that is not likely to change until its 27
member countries figure out how to better muster and coordinate the crude
authority of military power.
On Monday, Brussels took a small but significant step to that end. E.U. foreign ministers formally gave the go-ahead for the Union's biggest-ever peacekeeping force outside Europe. A 3,500-strong mission will depart on February 1 for Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR), with the task of protecting refugees fleeing from the neighboring Sudanese province of Darfur and others displaced by internal fighting.
The E.U. has been involved in military engagements beyond its backyard before, but such an ambitious mission so far from Europe is being touted as a turning point in E.U. foreign policy. It is considerably larger that 2003's Operation Artemis, a 1,400-strong E.U. rapid reaction force in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and smaller, mainly humanitarian missions to Georgia, the Aceh region of Indonesia and Ukraine.

There appears to be no end in sight to the running street battles which have rocked Kenya since the disputed presidential elections and there are growing indications that the violence may even escalate.

A journalist returning from Naivasha saw groups of youths hefting crude weapons which include clubs and machetes manning illegal road blocks in the Nairobi-Naivasha road demanding identification cards from all vehicles.  
Police stood between two groups of nearly 500 Kikuyu youths on one side and another of nearly 400 from different tribes outside the Lake Naivasha Country Club who were baying for each other's blood in revenge killings that have stunned this peaceful east African nation.