Briefly

KENYA

Tremors empty office buildings

NAIROBI — High-rise buildings emptied and frightened office workers hurried home early after earth tremors struck Nairobi yesterday for a fifth day.

The government urged people not to panic as geologists blamed the successive quakes on stirrings underneath God’s Mountain, an active volcano 150 miles southwest of Nairobi in Tanzania.

The tremors, which have been striking since Saturday, have ranged in intensity from 4.4 to 6.0 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At least three sustained tremors struck the city of 3 million yesterday.

ZIMBABWE

Mugabe rebukes fallen archbishop

HARARE — Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe yesterday rebuked Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube for breaking his vow of celibacy after state press ran pictures of the president’s chief critic in bed with a married woman.

Zimbabwe’s state-run press published pictures Tuesday that it said showed Archbishop Ncube naked in his bedroom with a woman whose husband is now suing the archbishop for adultery.

GHANA

British girls appear on cocaine charges

ACCRA — Two British teenage girls arrested in Ghana in possession of several pounds of cocaine appeared in juvenile court yesterday, officials said.

The 16-year-olds were discovered with $610,000 worth of cocaine at Accra Airport on July 2 during a joint Ghanaian-British narcotics operation, British officials have said.

They had been due to board a British Airways flight to London and were arrested when false bottoms in their luggage were found to hold 14 pounds of cocaine.

One of the students, whose names have not been released, has told British television they were set up by “two boys over here who gave us two bags” to deliver to another person at the airport in London.

BRITAIN

Sportswear tycoon to donate fortune

LONDON — Scotland’s richest man pledged yesterday to give away his $2 billion fortune to charity to help alleviate poverty in Africa.

Tom Hunter said he plans to donate the huge amount to causes in developing countries and in Britain during the rest of his lifetime, in one of the largest charitable donations in modern British history.

Mr. Hunter, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, started out selling sports shoes from the back of a van and by 1984 founded the sportswear shop chain Sports Division. In April, the Sunday Times Rich List named him as Scotland’s first homegrown billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $2 billion.

SOMALIA

Peacekeeping mission extended by AU

ADDIS ABABA — African Union peacekeepers will remain in Somalia another six months, the organization decided at a meeting yesterday, just hours before the force’s mandate expired.

“The mandate was due to end this evening, and the U.N. was to take over from Amisom [the AU peacekeeping force], but for the moment the U.N. is not ready, [so] we have decided to stay on,” AU spokesman Assane Ba told Agence France-Presse.

From wire dispatches and staff reports