Kenyan police have arrested 29 Ugandans suspected of seeking to join Islamist rebels in Somalia, a police spokesman said Sunday.

The suspects were arrested in Nairobi and were "undergoing interrogation," Eric Kiraithe told AFP. "Police are investigating them because they are believed to have been headed to Somalia to fight" alongside Shebab rebels.

The arrest of ex-Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo was "just the beginning" of the probe in the west African country, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor said Wednesday.

"This is the first case in the Cote d'Ivoire. It would not be the last case. This is just the beginning," Luis Moreno-Ocampo told Agence France Presse in an interview by phone.

A team of Ugandan and French paleontologists announced Tuesday they had found a 20-million-year-old ape skull in northeastern Uganda, saying it could shed light on the region's evolutionary history.

"This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found ... it is a highly important fossil and it will certainly put Uganda on the map in terms of the scientific world," Martin Pickford, a paleontologist from the College de France in Paris, told journalists in Kampala.

The World Bank on Monday pledged more than $500 million (348 million euros) to aid the drought-stricken Horn of Africa region, as United Nations aid chiefs met in Rome to discuss ramping up relief efforts.

The bulk of the money will go towards long-term projects to aid livestock farmers while $12 million will be for immediate assistance to those worst hit by the crisis and facing starvation, the World Bank said in a statement.

Twelve million people in the drought-hit Horn of Africa region need emergency aid, the U.N. food agency said on Wednesday, appealing for $120 million to help desperate farmers.

"Around 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are currently in need of emergency assistance," the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement, adding that hundreds of people are dying every day in the crisis.

Anti-landmine activists in western Uganda were stunned to discover a primary school using an unexploded mortar bomb as a bell, the group's coordinator told Agence France Presse on Monday.

"It was a big shock. When we arrived at the school we even found one of the students striking it," Wilson Bwambale, coordinator of Anti-Mines Network Rwenzori, said.

Diseases that ravage wheat fields are as old as time itself. The ancient Romans even had a legend to explain the terrible plagues.

According to the myth, a mischievous young boy tied a flaming wheat straw to a fox's tail, torturing the animal. This single act angered the Roman god Robigus so much that he unleashed a rust-colored plague on the fields that turned all the crops to black.

Initial test results indicate that a 12-year-old girl died of the deadly Ebola virus in a town about 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Kampala, health officials told Agence France Presse.

Preliminary testing carried out at the Uganda Virus Research Institute showed on Friday that the girl died from the virus on May 6 at Bombo hospital, said Dr Miriam Nanyunja, disease prevention and control officer for the World Health Organization in Uganda.

Calm returned Friday to several towns in Uganda affected by clashes between police and opposition supporters that left 57 people injured, officials said.

Opposition supporters were protesting a rise in the cost of living and what they say is bad governance by President Yoweri Museveni.

Whoever wins this week's presidential election in Uganda will have to manage national reserves of 2.5 billion barrels of oil, a recent find that has transformed the country's financial outlook.

President Yuweri Museveni is expected to win re-election in Friday's poll but will face the toughest challenge yet to his 25-year rule from veteran opposition leader Kizza Besigye, according to analysts.