Sierra Leone forward Kei Kamara has signed a new deal with Columbus Crew in the US Major League Soccer (MLS).

The 31-year-old has extended his contract just ahead of the new season and keeps at the club until 2018.

He is the second designated player on the roster list in the current Columbus Crew squad after Federico Higuain.

"I feel really great to sign a contract with Columbus, this is the team when I first started playing my professional career," he told BBC Sport.

Image source, Getty Images

Read the full BBC Sport story here

Mohammud Ali Mohamed
BBC Africa, Nairobi

A military court in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has sentenced to death a former journalist accused of masterminding the killings of other Somali journalists.

Hassan Hanafi, a member of the Islamist militant al-Shabab group, was arrested in Kenya in August 2014 while on the run.

The court ruled that he should be executed by firing squad.

The prosecution accused him of killing five well-known Somali journalists since 2007. 

Hanafi joined al-Shabab a few years ago after a stint with Radio Andalus, the group's mouthpiece in Somalia.

According to the global media watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists, 59 journalists have been killed in Somalia since 1992 – 33 since 2007. 

Read more about life for Somali journalists.

Image source, AFP

Photojournalist Alexia Webster set up interim portrait studios across Africa photographing and printing immediate portraits for more than 800 refugee families residing in camps.

She's been speaking to the BBC's Newsday programme about a 16-year-old boy she photographed in the Bulengo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp outside Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.  

"The fighting broke out in his village... He lived in the IDP camp all alone for almost a year until one day when he was walking through the market in the camp and saw his mother."

Hundreds queued for the portraits, with many bringing their children so they could have their first family pictures taken.

Her "Refugee Street Studio" project began when a man said he felt exploited by her usual photo documentaries of African refugees and displaced peoples.

It's a question you could argue about all day, but according to world football governing body Fifa, there's officially a new number one team on the continent, as our BBC Africa Sport reporter tweets: 

Image source, Getty Images

Aboubakar Famau
BBC Africa, Arusha, Tanzania

Tanzania's President John Magufuli and his Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta have laid a foundation stone to revamp the road linking the Tanzanian town of Arusha to the town of Voi in Kenya.

The current 234km (145-mile) road will be widened to four tarmac lanes. 

At the moment it gets very congested with lorries and other vehicles heading to and from the Holili-Taveta border post - and accidents are common further delaying travel.

It is being funded by the African Development Bank, the Japanese government and the East African Community trading bloc.

The project is set to be finished by 2018 – something that President Magufuli noted.

The Tanzanian leader, who is a stickler for time-keeping and has launched a crackdown on corruption since he came to office last year, warned the minister in charge of the project to make sure it was completed on time.

Read more about Tanzania's "Bulldozer" president.

South African media are reporting on the apology from the Johannesburg wing of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, after it posted a picture of an ANC supporter in a specially designed bikini, bearing the party colours.

“The ANC has a long history of upholding women and respecting women’s rights. We are not about denigrating women and depicting them as objects. We apologise for the unfortunate incident,” a party spokesperson told local newspaper The Sowetan, external.   

Kenya's government is launching an ambitious scheme to provide all first year primary school students with laptops, but some schools still lack the most basic equipment. 

The BBC's Emmanuel Ignunza tells the story of two schools:

And in this piece Emmanuel looks at the laptop scheme in more detail.

Let us know what you think, should all children have laptops - or are desks more important? Use the hashtag #BBCAfricaLive to comment on Twitter.

Image source, AP

An Egyptian student is facing deportation from the US for posting on his Facebook page that he was willing to kill Republican politician Donald Trump - and the world would thank him, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Emadeldin Elsayed, 23, is not facing criminal charges over the message, but was arrested by immigration authorities last month and will now face a hearing to find out whether he will be deported. 

Mr Elsayed said he wrote the message because he was angered by Mr Trump's comments about Muslims.

He said he immediately regretted it, and he never intended to harm anyone, AP adds. 

An Egyptian English language newspaper has tweeted the story:

Image source, AFP

At least 50,000 people have been killed in South Sudan's two-year civil war, a senior UN official has said, speaking to a group of reporters on condition of anonymity.

This is a five-fold increase in the death toll given by humanitarian agencies in the early months of the conflict, Reuters news agency reports.

"Fifty thousand killed, maybe more, 2.2 million refugees and displaced, famine coming and looming in just a few months," the official said.

The civil war in South Sudan - the world’s youngest country - erupted in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused Riek Machar, his former deputy, of plotting a coup.

Mr Machar denied this but formed a rebel army. He has been reappointed as vice-president following an August peace deal which was agreed amid a threat of sanctions.

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said on Wednesday that the parties "were dragging their feet on its implementation", the AFP news agency reports.

A former BBC reporter in Somalia, who now works for a non-governmental organisation, tweets about reports from the southern city of Kismayo:

Image source, AFP

The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 200 people in recent weeks including 54 children - during a sharp rise in attacks.

The report by LRA Crisis Tracker, external says the group, led by Joseph Kony, may have forced the children to become soldiers, sex slaves or camp labourers.

It says the LRA has already abducted nearly twice as many people in the region this year as in the whole of 2015.

“This is a huge change in the modus operandi of the group and we've definitely seen this as a change in tactic,” Sean Poole from Invisible Children, a member of the monitoring group, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

“It represents a much larger [number] over the last three months that we've seen in any calendar year over the past few years.

Today’s African proverb: 

Click here to send us your African proverbs.

Image source, AFP

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