In Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ceremony started with a blast on a 12ft-high Celtic war horn, while churches in the Isle Of Man and Northern Ireland all took part.

BBC: Mass bell-ringing heralds Olympics opening

In terms of lives lost, this war in the Horn of Africa compares to that in Congo.

ECONOMIST: Scramble for Africa

He did not toot his horn over the end of the Cold War.

CNN: Time to toot horn for George H.W. Bush

Unlike Afghanistan, which has opium (and Iraq which has oil), the Horn has little of economic value to fuel a war: its frontline, after all, can barely keep a cow alive.

ECONOMIST: The Horn of Africa

Quite apart from the military casualties, whatever they really were, the renewed fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians who will now join the 13m people in the Horn of Africa facing starvation because of drought and war.

ECONOMIST: Ethiopia��s and Eritrea��s forgotten war, resumed

This reinforced the Americans' desire to build and control a canal across the isthmus of Panama, so that their ships could move between the Atlantic and the Pacific without going all the way round Cape Horn (as the American battleship Oregon had to do during the war).

ECONOMIST: THE WAR OF 1898

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, jockeying for influence on the Horn of Africa, poured weapons into Somalia and Ethiopia.

NPR: Somalia: Decades of Unintended Consequences

When most people hear of the Horn of Africa, they tend to think of chillingly negative images of suffering, famine and war.

WHITEHOUSE: Champions of Change Blog