Africa Continues to Boil

Eight people have been killed in separate attacks in western and central Kenya, government officials said Friday, underlining the difficulty of reversing Kenya's cycle of postelection violence despite President Mwai Kibaki and his rival agreeing to share power. On Thursday, Kibaki urged lawmakers to pass the laws needed to enforce the country's new power-sharing agreement that was reached last week. It calls for Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to share power after both sides claimed victory in the Dec. 27 presidential election. Their dispute unleashed weeks of bloodshed, killing more than 1,000 people and exposing divisions over land and economic inequality.

China vigorously defended its policy on Darfur on Friday against critics seeking to link Beijing's close relations with Sudan to this summer's Olympic Games. Liu Guijin, China's special envoy for Darfur, said Beijing was working hard to help end the humanitarian crisis in the troubled Sudanese region, where five years of fighting between rebels and government troops and allied militia has killed at least 200,000 people and displaced 2.2 million since 2003.

Islamist insurgents killed five government soldiers while briefly seizing a strategic town in central Somalia late Thursday, police and residents said. A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said several military vehicles were also destroyed in Belet Weyne, the provincial capital of the central Somali region of Hiraan, 200 miles north of Mogadishu. Islamist fighters have vowed to wage an Iraq-style war on the shaky Western-backed transitional government after Somali troops supported by their Ethiopian allies chased the Islamists from power in December 2005. The Islamists had seized control of much of the south and the country's capital, Mogadishu, which they had held for six months.

• JJ Commentary: What the media fails to report is that in each African country where violence runs rampant, it is Islam that is stirring up the unrest.