Growing numbers of Congolese refugees like Kashindi Iddi are opting to head home from Tanzania as the situation eases in their home province of South Kivu across Lake Tanganyika. "In 1998, I fled my home town of Matongo because of the war in South Kivu. Today, I'm returning with my wife and three children," Iddi, holding his two-year-old son by the hand, said as he waited to board a UNHCR-charted ferry at the port of Kigoma.

The Polisario Front on Saturday (August 30th) said it was prepared to enter into "serious and intensive" negotiations with Morocco over Western Sahara, two days after the United Nations confirmed that a new mediator will replace special envoy Peter van Walsum, whose mandate expired last week. The Polisario said it would resume dialogue "on the basis of international legality on decolonisation, through holding a free and fair referendum overseen by the United Nations".

Leaving Algeria illegally is now considered a criminal offence. In the new Penal Code, approved Sunday (August 31st) by the Council of Ministers, harragas (illegal immigrants) may receive prison sentences of up to six months. Penalties are harsher for the traffickers who co-ordinate the migration networks, allowing sentences up to ten years in the worst cases.

'Express care', a new model for providing care to people starting antiretroviral therapy in which most of the burden for seeing patients is shifted to nurses, is associated with reduced death rates (by about 50%) and reduced losses to follow-up among people with CD4 cell counts of less than 100 cells/mm3, according to a Kenyan presentation made earlier this month at the International AIDS Conference, in Mexico City.

HIV prevalence and incidence in rural Uganda appear to be increasing, researchers report in a study published in the August 20th edition of AIDS. Coinciding with these increases, the investigators observed changes in HIV sexual risk behaviours in certain groups. The study was conducted in villages in rural Uganda and the trends it revealed mirror other evidence from Uganda pointing to increases in HIV prevalence and incidence.