The situation keeps getting worse, with dozens of people being burned to death in a church.

A mob torched a church where hundreds had sought refuge Tuesday, and witnesses said dozens of people — including children — were burned alive or hacked to death with machetes in ethnic violence that followed Kenya’s disputed election.

The killing of up to 50 ethnic Kikuyus in the Rift Valley city of Eldoret brought the death toll from four days of rioting to more than 275, raising fears of further unrest in what has been one of Africa’s most stable democracies.

This, and the slaying of an American diplomat and his driver, comes on the heels of the corrupted reelection of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

President Mwai Kibaki, who was swiftly inaugurated for a second term Sunday after a vote that critics said was rigged, called for a meeting with his political opponents — a significant softening of tone for a man who rarely speaks to the press and who vowed to crack down on rioters.

But opposition candidate Raila Odinga refused, saying he would meet Kibaki only “if he announces that he was not elected.” Odinga accused the government of stoking the chaos, telling The Associated Press in an interview that Kibaki’s administration “is guilty, directly, of genocide.”

As for the American diplomat, we now have more details on him. His name was John Michael Granville, 33, and worked for USAID.

A US diplomat and his driver were shot dead in a possible terror attack in Sudan yesterday while returning home from a new year party at the British Embassy in Khartoum.

John Michael Granville, 33, who worked for the US Agency for International Development, reportedly left the party and dropped off another person before being shot five times at close range at about 4am as he returned to his home near the UN compound in Khartoum.

Mr Granville underwent surgery but died several hours later. Abdel Rahman Abbas, 40, his Sudanese driver, died immediately.

The shooting resembled the murder of Laurence Foley, a US aid official shot outside his home in Amman, the Jordanian capital, in 2002. A military court in Jordan imposed the death penalty on eight Islamic militants linked to al-Qaeda – six of them in absentia… the shootings came a day after the UN took over command of the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. On Monday President Bush signed a law making it easier for US investment managers to divest from Sudan. Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, has called for militants to attack UN peacekeepers in Sudan.

Mr. Granville was very devoted to his work in Africa, saying “he wouldn’t want to be doing anything else”.