Police raided news stands in major Kenyan towns on 10 January and confiscated copies of newspapers published by the "alternative press". Scores of vendors were arrested in the well-coordinated crackdown, which Tourism and Information Minister Raphael Tuju said was aimed at getting rid of illegal newspapers. He added that the action was taken because the newspapers had not complied with the law on "registration, execution of a bond and making returns".

Managing editor of the weekly "Le Républicain" newspaper, Mamane Abou, was released on bail by the court of criminal appeal in Niamey on January 6, after spending two months in a prison at Say, 56 km outside the capital, for libel. He had been sentenced to six months in prison for "criminal defamation" against the Prime Minister, Hama Amadou and his former Finance Minister, Ali Badjo Gamatié.

Ten million Africans now constitute an invisible nation that resides outside Africa. Although invisible, it is a nation as populous as Angola, Malawi, Zambia or Zimbabwe. If it were to be a nation with distinct borders, it would have an income roughly equivalent to Africa's gross domestic product. Although the African Union does not recognize the African Diaspora as a nation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledges its economic importance. The IMF estimates the African Diaspora now constitutes the biggest group of foreign investors in Africa. What few realize is that Africans who immigrate to the United States contribute 40 times more wealth to the American than to the African economy. According to the United Nations, an African professional working in the United States contributes about $150,000 per year to the U.S. economy. Can the “brain drain” be reversed? This is the question posed in a keynote speech to the Pan African Conference on the Brain Drain held in Elsah, Illinois in October 2003. "My answer is: yes. But in order for it to happen, we must try something different," says Philip Emeagwali, who won the Gordon Bell Prize for inventing a formula that allows computers to perform their fastest computations - a discovery that inspired the reinvention of supercomputers. Debate the African Diaspora by reading this speech and sending your opinions to [email protected] for publication in Pambazuka News.

In the past few years instant messaging (IM) has been kicking off in a big way. Many of you are probably familiar with chat rooms, well IM works on a similar principle, only you get to choose who you talk to. This method of communication is a lot safer than a chat room as you know exactly with whom you will be speaking, and if they do get offensive, you will always have the ability to block them for as long as you see fit.

Twelve Burundians were killed when a large group of gunmen singing "Alleluia" launched a night raid on a village outside the capital, a government official said on Monday. The latest killings underscored the persistence of violence in Burundi during a visit by President Domitien Ndayizeye to Europe in search of donor funds to reward progress in ending more than a decade of civil war.

Kenya, seeking to end an unhappy era of tribal "Big Man" rule, resumed faltering efforts to write a new constitution on Monday, dogged by feuding inside the government over how to dilute the powers of the president. A constitutional conference reconvened on the outskirts of Nairobi to map out long-awaited reforms aimed at trimming the powers of the office accumulated by former president Daniel arap Moi and independence leader Jomo Kenyatta.

Corrupt 'fat cats' continue to walk around with their heads held high even though they have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. The consequences of their acts are set to remain a burden on this poor southern African country of more than 11 million people as it prepares to go to the polls in May. The problem began three years ago when Malawi's Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) arrested a number of suspects, after the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament audit report revealed K187 million (about 1.8 million dollars), meant for building schools and support infrastructure, went missing.

The country's largest human rights group, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), has been clamouring for the death penalty to be abolished for several years. Chuma Ubani, who heads the group, says this is essential to prevent further miscarriages of justice. "One of the arguments we have against the death penalty is that once the punishment is inflicted, it is final. Even if at the end of the day it is found that it was done in error, there can be no remedy," he told IPS. After coming under pressure from European parliamentarians to do away with capital punishment, the Nigerian government has initiated a countrywide debate to gauge national opinion on this matter.

With an estimated 30 percent of Angolan children aged between five and 14 forced to work, officials and aid groups gathered on Wednesday to discuss ways of tackling child exploitation. The meeting in the southern Cunene province was expected to highlight children's rights, an issue that has largely been ignored in Angola.

The government of Burkina Faso has launched a nationwide survey to find out just how successful its 12-year campaign against female circumcision has been and the first results are encouraging. In 1992, when the campaign against female genital mutilation (FMG) was launched, two thirds of all women in this poor landlocked country suffered the ritual cutting out of their clitoris around the age of puberty. First results from the latest national survey show that in some areas of Burkina Faso the proportion of girls subjected to FMG has fallen to just one or two percent.

Two questions (Pambazuka News 137: 2003: The way it could have been). Why is the "leftist" press in the U.S. ignoring this change of heart? And why is Lockheed-Martin the only U.S. company still hiring people like me who'd rather be building infrastructure than tearing it down? Seriously, I hope you wouldn't mind if I reposted the entire editorial on Alternet. I'd also like to act as if it's serious reportage and quote bits in my next email to the White House. I intend to say that, given his change of heart, I rather fancy voting for him. (snerk) Thank you for keeping us so well informed about the things that matter.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has reiterated its decision to embark on strike action on January 21, and asked the Federal Government to account for the income it generated from the deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, even as it declared “illegal and unconstitutional” the fuel tax. The national executive of the NLC which endorsed the strike stated that “the duration and the character” of the strike shall be decided by the national administrative council of the NLC before the commencement of the strike.

While the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a welcome addition to pan-African institutional structure, its design will have to be improved for it to be truly successful. First, APRM should greatly narrow the scope of its reviews if it is to deliver competent assessments. Second NEPAD should devote significant resources to allow civil society in the reviewed country to do assessments of their own, and to critique the APRM assessment. This is according to a paper on the APRM by Ravi Kanbur, T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.

In 2003, an exciting initiative to obtain the Nobel Peace Prize for 1000 women in 2005, was launched by a group of Swiss women led by Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold, a member of the Swiss Parliament and the Council of Europe. 1000 women all over the world working for peace in their countries, communities and neighbourhoods will be found and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why a thousand women? Because finding and documenting the work of a million would be too much work in so little time. The idea is to call the world's attention to the vital but largely unheralded role of women in peace making and peace building.

"Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) is particularly concerned that these fresh arrests compromise the independence and entrenched freedoms of the press. ZLHR views the action by the police as a calculated and deliberate attempt to muzzle the independent media and deprive Zimbabweans from fully enjoying the right to freedom of expression. ZLHR is concerned that if such a tragic trend is to continue, it will be impossible for journalists to continue carrying out their mandate to keep the public informed. " - Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights statement on the arrest of independent journalists in Zimbabwe this week.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy, speaking at the closure of the WSF3.

The future shape of the World Social Forum (WSF) will continue to be moulded as up to 75 000 people meet in a massive “free space” between 16-21 January in Mumbai, India to discuss the ravages of the neo-liberal order on all aspects of global life. The fourth WSF will focus debate on the areas of imperialist globalisation, religious sectarianism, identity politics and fundamentalism, castes, racism and social exclusion, patriarchy and militarisation. The WSF has become an annual event that is organised as an antidote to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, seen by civil society opposition as an elite deliberation between world leaders and international financial institutions.

Several hundred members of the African Social Forum (ASF) will represent Africa at the WSF. The ASF has taken place annually, since Bamako in 2002, as a prelude to the WSF. Following the Bamako Forum and the second ASF meeting, the Addis Ababa Forum, a process of consultations have taken place around Africa to find a way of effectively exposing the current social, political and economic injustices for better government and state action. These have resulted in various regional forums designed to create a platform for interest groups of civil society to discuss issues together relating to social, political and economic justice. An example of a regional forum is the Southern African Social Forum, whose objectives are to: Provide the sub-regional platform for social activists to strengthen popular democracy and mobilization; Critically challenge the status quo; Build a regional solidarity network around issues of social, political and economical justice; and, Create a loose coalition that will guarantee effective participation in the future Southern African Social Forum (SASF), the Africa Social Forum (ASF) and the World Social Forum (WSF).

At the first ASF meeting in Bamako, more than two hundred social movements, organisations and institutions from forty-three African countries met to undertake serious analyses, shared experiences and heard testimonies on wide-ranging economic, social, political and cultural matters affecting African peoples.

A strong consensus emerged at the Bamako Forum that the values, practices, structures and institutions of the currently dominant neo-liberal order would not lead to the realisation of Africa's dignity, values and aspirations. The Forum rejected neo-liberal globalisation and further integration of Africa into an unjust system as a basis for its growth and development. In this context, there was a strong consensus against initiatives such as the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and trade liberalisation. The Bamako Forum also noted that neo-liberal globalization had further eroded the human rights of the people of Africa. “When the basic needs of the people to food, shelter, clothing, housing and sources of energy are daily under threat because of forced privatisation and opening up of Africa to multinational corporations, then neither democracy nor human rights are possible,” a statement from the forum reads.

Development, said the Forum, should be based on the human being and not on the profit of corporations. Furthermore, it was only on the basis of the satisfaction of the basic material needs and the human rights of the people that genuine democracy could be built.

At the second ASF held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from January 5-9, 2003 over 200 African women, men and young people from 40 countries participated. They represented social movements, trade unions, peasants' organisations, NGOs and research institutions, and reaffirmed opposition to and rejection of the global neo-liberal system, its institutions and clubs, namely, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the G 8 and the World Economic Forum. Presentations were made on various thematic issues, including international trade, privatization, debt, the African Union, wars and conflicts, agriculture, the question of food security, health, and African cultures. The practice of social movements in Africa since the Bamako meeting was also reviewed, as was the progress made to develop and strengthen the ASF, to consolidate its place within the world anti-neoliberal movement, and to build popular struggles for economic justice on the ground.
The Forum observed that past and present economic policies implemented by African governments have failed to improve the lives of ordinary Africans. “We concluded that only a dynamic civil society organized in strong and active social movements can and must challenge the neo-liberal political economy of globalization. The consensus was that we need to build a new African state and society, where public institutions and policies will guarantee cultural, economic, political and social rights for all citizens,” said a statement.

There was also a consensus that African unity and social integration were fundamental aspirations of the ASF. Unity had to be organized and achieved through democratic mechanisms and institutions built with the popular participation of the African masses. “This is why the ASF expressed deep concern and dissatisfaction with the neo-liberal orientation of the African Union through its adoption of NEPAD as the paradigm of Africa 's development…The African Social Forum commits itself to developing, promoting and popularizing, in a participatory manner, an alternative development paradigm, based on fundamental principles of democracy, human rights, gender equality and social justice.”
The WSF offers the ASF the opportunity to consolidate links with and make input into a global platform opposing neo-liberal globalisation. In the current global political economy, it might be easy to believe that the ASF and its bigger relative the WSF are likely to have little impact on world events. But as Jai Sen, a member of the WSF India Working Committee and Coordination Team, writes: “Perhaps most importantly, the WSF has struck at the level of meaning. It has resonantly made clear that there is an alternative to economic, capitalist globalisation, there are alternatives. And that people all over the world are now mobilising to live those alternatives. In this way, the WSF – along with all the other forms of global civil action that are also taking place - is playing a profound role in freeing peoples all over the world of the shackles of the colonisation of the mind.”

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The above article was compiled by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu, with material sourced from the links below:

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=12669
http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=11315
http://www.enda.sn/Forum%20social/english/bamakoeng.htm
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/1417.html
http://www.wsfindia.org/anotherworld.php
http://www.labournet.info/wsfbook2004/guide.doc
http://www.labournet.info/wsfbook2004/cock.doc
http://earth.prohosting.com/sasf2003/mission.htm
http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/72788/1/
http://www.tni.org/acts/wsf/wsf4.htm
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-12/30prashad.cfm
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=21911

I read, with a sense of relief, that Madiba has expressed his anger with the United States of America. Not a moment too soon. However endearing the 330 million individuals who constitute the American people may be, the mindset that this super power has produced is beyond doubt, a serious threat to world peace. Why? Well take a load of the arsenal for starters. Then let us consider this not so small matter of economic imperialism. Such a cool gig: got the bucks, call the shots. Sick last century stuff. Last but not least let us not overlook the danger of arrogant ignorance. When only a mere fraction of a wealthy population (18%) bother to get passports and they vote by virtue of their choices and exert a major influence on global affairs, please forgive this little African woman when she asks a few questions.

I arrived in America a few days after 9/11. I arrived from a small African country and was regarded as a heroine for being so brave as to fly! Perhaps having lived through a so-called terrorist war which was in fact a liberation struggle had immunised me to an extent against hysteria. I didn't feel brave - I was just longing to visit precious friends and there had been tremendous spontaneous compassion for the victims and their families in my homelands. We, who are no strangers to suffering and violence. People who had not even seen the, by now, nigh almost indelible images of the World Trade Towers morphing into Ground Zero. People who when they heard I was about to go to the USA said, "Ah sisi ... please tell America sorry for this terrible thing." People who do not have television sets but had heard, via bush telegraph, of what had transpired. People with heart per chance. African people. All I know is that back home we were horrified and saddened by the disaster. It was not wasted energy for empathy is always of value.

My compassion remains intact. However, the Hollywoodesque flourishes to the aftermath tarnished the bereavement. I heard literally hundreds of Americans say "We were hit on our own soil!" as if this were unique and apocalyptic. Eventually, I found myself saying to one, "Perhaps you could discuss this with the 100 or so countries your army is currently occupying. It could be an interesting bonding experience." My educated friend was clueless about this which I found disturbing. Bombs and refreshments to Afghanistan was a policy that went unchallenged as was the overnight erosion of internal civil and human rights. Right there in the heartland of the free and the brave. Stunning what you can get away with when you declare a unilateral global war against terror.

* Read the rest of this article by clicking on the link below.

Increasingly attention is being given to documenting the extent to which Africa (and the rest of the developing world) is in fact providing development aid, as opposed to being a recipient of Aid. This aid is being provided through myriad ways including financial relations, subsidising ecological resources, provision of ready trained skilled labour and, increasingly, providing holiday resorts of unbeatable value.

The slave trade was the most visceral manifestation of the ongoing exploitative relationship between Africa and the rich world. The haunting images of manacled Africans toiling in the cotton fields of the USA have now been replaced with images of starvation, war, brutality, fecklessness and HIV. These graphic images, beamed throughout the world, perpetuate a sense of need and dependence that serves the purposes of powerful and wealthy states. Such images make it easy to believe that Africa both requires and could benefit from Western Aid. This however belies the real relationship between Africa and the West. In reality, in order to understand Africa’s relationship with the developed world, it is important to look at figures which show that, far from contributing nothing to the economy of developed countries and taking everything in return, Africa’s contribution to developed countries could be considered as its own form of development aid.

According to Jubilee Research the accumulated external debt of the world’s richest country, the USA, is $2.2 trillion – almost the same as the $2.5 trillion owed by the entire developing world including India, China and Brazil. They calculate that this means that every American citizen owes the rest of the world $7,333 while every citizen of all the developing countries only owes the rest of the world $500. Meanwhile the poor are financing the debt of the developed world, as capital flows from poor countries, helping to lower rich countries interest rates and inflate the value of their currencies, enable them to purchase goods from the rest of the world far more cheaply than they would otherwise have been able to do.

Jubilee Research have also quantified the economic damage attributable to natural disasters arising from climate change as being more than $300 billion per annum. Industrialised countries (at least historically) are almost entirely responsible for human driven global warming although 96% of all deaths from natural disasters occur in developing countries. The value of economic output built on growing ‘carbon debt’ (in which carbon debt is calculated according to the amount by which a country exceeded its fair share in the emission of greenhouse gasses) attributable to the G7 countries, was estimated as being in the region of $13- 15 trillion for a typical year in the 1990’s – while the conventionally indebted poor countries had a carbon credit that could be valued at three times their orthodox debt. Thus if this concept of debt is used, the developing world is subsidising the rich world and should perhaps be considering what structural adjustment processes the rich world needs to put in place in order to meet their debt repayments.

The UNDP calculated that by 1987 nearly one third of Africa’s skilled people had moved to Europe - Sudan lost 17% of doctors and dentists, 20% of University teaching staff, 30% of engineers and 45% of surveyors in 1978; 60% of Ghanaian doctors trained in the early 80s are now abroad; and Africa as a whole is thought to have lost up to 60 000 middle and high level managers between 1985 and 1990. This reverse subsidy seems set to continue. Some estimates indicate that mechanistic and flawed developed country staff forecasting needs mean that the USA, for example, will require 1 million additional nurses in the next ten years to meet its shortfall.

Writers on human resources such as Bundred and Martineau put the cost of training a GP as US$60 000, calculating a reverse subsidy from the developing world of US$500m per annum just for health personnel. In South Africa alone, the loss of more than 82,000 skilled personnel over an eight-year period between 1989 and 1997 is estimated to have cost the country US$5 billion. UNCTAD quantified US savings of US$3.86 billion in training costs as a result of importing 21 000 Nigerian doctors over a ten year period.

Central to these startling statistics are structural adjustment programmes. Rather than providing restitution for the period of formal occupation of African Countries that took place between the 1880s and 1960s, the West channelled large sums of monies into newly independent African countries through massive bank loans. In the process a number of Banks became severely stretched. With the 80s came an intense period of structural adjustment programmes, the immediate objective of which, according to Walden Bello, was to rescue banks that had become overextended; the longer-term objective was to further integrate Southern countries into the North dominated world economy. Although initially few countries were keen to take structural adjustment loans, as more and more countries ran into difficulty servicing the huge debts made to them, so they had no option but to ‘structurally adjust’.

Structural adjustments demanded that, as a pre-condition to receiving aid, developing countries open their markets to globalisation and privatise their utilities such as water and electricity services. Among the other requirements were tightening of state expenditure and devaluation of currencies resulting in an end to free health and education and dramatic cut backs in these services.

The withdrawal of resources for education and health initiated a cycle of deprivation in which working conditions, including salaries deteriorated, triggering an exodus of staff and further debilitating the services. Simultaneously, funding of academic training institutions was reduced, and there was a concurrent flight of intellectuals and decimation of institutions of higher learning. Philip Altbach calculates that roughly 1.5 million students (most of whom leave the South to study in the North) study in countries outside their own, and a significant number do not return.

The net effect has been to strip countries of a significant component of their social capital and create a vacuum of skill, conveniently providing jobs for highly trained Westerners, (to be paid for in hard currency) and simultaneously the conditions for Africa to be reduced to providing technical level education and producing a workforce only fit to do the dirty jobs of the rich world.

And just as there seems to be broad agreement that Structural Adjustment has not been beneficial to Africa, General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is ready and poised to fill the gap. The combined worth of health and education markets is estimated to be US$5 Trillion according to Bertrand and Kalafatides. If the major proponents of GATS have their way, all these services will be up for grabs by powerful Transnational Corporations, and the right of African States to provide these common goods will be emasculated.

What the figures above show is that, combined with conditions like structural adjustment and GATS, the cycle of development aid from Africa to Europe and the rest will be continued. For African intellectuals, students, political activists and Africanists everywhere this signals a call for international solidarity of the kind inspired by the anti-apartheid movement - as a countervailing force against the new world order that compels Africa to continue to feed the bloated stomach of greed.

* Antoinette Ntuli is Director of HealthLink and Chairs the Co-ordinating Committee of the Global Equity Gauge Alliance
* Please send comments on this editorial - and other events in Africa - to

Over the past five months, 49,262 people in the Bahr-el-Ghazal province of south Sudan have been treated for malaria by Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) medical teams that are using bicycles to get to areas that have been isolated by recent severe floods. A total of 71,006 people have been treated in the area - including 800 severe cases - when figures from the fixed facilities are included.

A voluntary repatriation agreement for Angolan refugees in South Africa was due to be signed in Pretoria on Sunday, allowing the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, to prepare for the 13,000-strong community to return home. South Africa becomes the sixth and last country in the region to sign a tripartite agreement with the Angolan government and UNHCR. It joins Africa's largest repatriation programme, which will return 450,000 Angolans who had fled the country's civil war over the next two years.

The health ministry of the Republic of Congo reported last Thursday that the current Ebola acute haemorrhagic fever syndrome outbreak in the country's northwestern Cuvette Ouest Department was stabilising, with 29 deaths among 42 registered cases to date. According to Damaze Bozongo, director-general of the health ministry, since 2 December, no further deaths had been registered in either Mbomo or Mbanza, two villages that were among the worst-affected in Cuvette Ouest, 800 km north of the capital, Brazzaville.

With the signing on 25 September 2003 of a framework agreement on security arrangements, the Sudanese government and the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA) are closer to peace than at any time in the past twenty years. However, considerable hurdles remain before any final deal is signed, and a separate, intensifying war in the west already threatens to undermine it. As the parties press forward with the last phases of negotiation, the international community’s engagement should intensify in support of the final deal, in preparation for helping with implementation if successful, and in ensuring coordination between the main peace process and the conflict in the west. This is according to a briefing from the International Crisis Group.

Zambian girls are defying traditional barriers, teenage pregnancy and the risk of HIV infection to go back to school to finish their education. They are doing this despite the findings of a new report that girls in sub-Saharan Africa face the highest school drop-out rate in the world, with up to 83 percent of all girls who no longer attend school living in the region. But "The State of the World's Children", released last Thursday by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) also lists the Programme for the Advancement of Girls' Education (PAGE), a collaboration between the Zambian government and UNICEF, as an example of the type of action required by governments and the international community to reverse the trend.

Established in June 2002, the Binti Pamoja Centre is designed to create a safe space for girls and young women to discuss reproductive health issues and to address problems such as gender discrimination, domestic abuse, and rape. Located in the low-income area of Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya, the Centre uses group discussion, art, and photography to enable young participants to speak out about - and, ultimately, effect social change related to - difficult issues.

e-CIVICUS 215: In this issue – ethical consumerism; child labour in West African cocoa; fair trade in tourism; and a brief overview of global trade. e-CIVICUS is distributed twice monthly in MS Word, plain text, or PDF format, and is also available in Spanish. To subscribe or unsubscribe please email [email protected]

Newly appointed Central African Republic (CAR) Prime Minister Celestin Le Roi Gaoumbale has formed a new transitional government to replace the one of Abel Goumba who was dismissed last Thursday and has since been appointed Vice-President, the minister for communication and government spokesman, Parfait Mbay, announced on Friday on state-owned Radio Centrafrique. The new government comprises 28 ministers, including two women and six military officers.

Intisar is 12 years old. She has never been to school. She used to leave peacefully on a farm with her mother and 14 siblings in rural Kass, southern Darfur, but then nomad militias arrived and started grazing their camels on her family’s land. Fighting in Darfur between Arab militias and rebel groups, which escalated in March this year, has driven an estimated 670,000 people from their homes, 70,000 of whom have fled across the border into neighbouring Chad.

Impunity is a major obstacle to human rights in the Republic of Congo (ROC), the NGO l'Association panafricaine Thomas Sankara (APTS) said on Wednesday in a report published in the capital, Brazzaville. According to the report, the Congolese people, having decided in favour of multipartyism, wished to live in a political system founded on the primacy of the law and respect for human rights. However, the establishment of such a state was being prevented by the ever-growing culture of impunity.

The strike by medical doctors and nurses in Zimbabwe is crippling the public health sector, at a time when the poor cannot afford high fees that private hospitals charge. Monica Ngwere, an asthmatic patient from Shurugwi in central Zimbabwe, was last week turned away from Parirenyatwa Referral Hospital in the capital, Harare.

A lively illegal trade in ivory is now flourishing in three populous states in West Africa, conservation groups say. They found more ivory in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal than the countries' own elephant populations could produce. They believe much of the ivory their teams found will have come from animals slaughtered by gangs in central Africa.

At Cancun, developing countries were better able to organise themselves and articulate their interests, but the question on how to proceed on various issues in open. The proposals from all sides should reflect what is in the best interests of development of developing countries. This paper from the Third World Network examines key issues after Cancun. "We should not be distracted by the blame game as to who caused Cancun to fail, and not be affected by any hints or accusations that developing countries were responsible and will now suffer for it. What is important is to examine what are the best options on substantive and process issues that will be in the interest of developing countries and to put these positions forward."

“Yes, Kenyans are celebrating forty years of self-rule, while the Ogiek are remembering the forty years of dispossession and institutional marginalisation of being rendered homeless and a lack of identity in their natural habitat. Safe to say while the majority of Kenyans are yearning for the economic and political recovery, the Ogiek are begging for recognised domicile. The Environment Minister is planning mass eviction, the beneficiaries will go back to their homes of nativity, the Ogiek might be forced to join the street families.” says this statement in support of the Ogiek.

Poor people's livelihoods depend on good health, but their home and work environments often threaten their well-being. Environmental risk factors account for 21 per cent of the overall burden of disease worldwide. Research for the UK Department for International Development examines the major risk factors and the strategies available to tackle them.

Host communities blame refugees for the spread of HIV/AIDS, according to a survey by the UNHCR. "Such sentiments are held not only by local people, but by politicians, some media and even humanitarian workers," said the UNHCR commissioner, also noting the direct correlation between the increase in the number of HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa, and hostility towards refugees. However, evidence suggests that HIV infection rates among refugees are lower than those in host communities.

Fighting in the town of Gambella in western Ethiopia has left at least 21 people dead, after Ethiopian troops moved into the city over the weekend in response to the killing of seven men, including three government officials, on Saturday, allAfrica.com reports. The seven men were allegedly ambushed by members of the Anuak ethnic group. According to Ethiopian officials, the event provoked clashes between Anuak and Nuer, the largest ethnic groups in the area.

State authorities in Guinea have banned an issue of the weekly newspaper "Jeune Afrique l'Intelligent". According to the Media Foundation for West Africa-Guinea, court officials who carried out the seizure order on 10 December 2003 refused to give reasons for their action. The issue in question carried an article with the headline, "Witch-Hunt in Army", which is said to have displeased the Guinean authorities.

On 11 December 2003, Oluwole Adeboye, a reporter with "P.M. News", an afternoon daily newspaper in Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos, fled his Agege home and has since been in hiding. This follows the publication of a story with the reporter's by-line about the alleged unprofessional conduct of Bamidele Adeola, a police constable.

The illegal gains allegedly generated by Goldenberg International could have paid for universal primary education in Kenya for a decade. So one expert witness claimed at a public inquiry that has driven home to Kenyans the price they have paid for mismanagement. Goldenberg was set up at the turn of the 1990s, allegedly as a vehicle to access pre-shipment financing and state compensation for gold and jewellery exports.

The book focuses on how the media covered the 2002 Presidential and Mayoral elections. It depicts the struggle to suffocate the truth and the efforts by the private media to get it heard. This translated to a media war- and ultimately Zimbabweans witnessed a monumental battle by Government to coerce the electorate to vote for the ruling party. An informed electorate will not vote for corrupt and incompetent government- and certainly not for one that undermines their constitutional rights. At the time of the 2002 elections the crisis afflicting the national economy was a source of increasing hardship for most of the population, politically motivated state sanctioned violence became a plague across the nation, and laws guaranteeing democratic practice were trampled underfoot by a government determined to retain control of power. Please send orders and enquiries to the Project Coordinator, MMPZ, 15 Duthie Avenue, Alexandra Park, Harare, Tel/fax: +263 4 703702, E-mail: [email][email protected]

A proposed hydropower project at Karuma falls was inflated by $200 million. Norpak, a Norwegian company, is developing the Karuma project. Karuma is competing with Bujagali for World Bank's approval. Subsequently, the World Bank lined up Bujagali - which is now dogged by bribery allegations.

The Washington DC-registered Herero People's Reparations Corporation has moved to US courts asking for $4 billion from the German government and several commercial corporations, among them the Deutsche Bank, SAF Marine (Woermann Lin) and Terex Corporation. They are accused of cold-bloodedly employing explicitly-sanctioned extermination, destruction of tribal culture, social organisation, medical experimentation and slavery in order to advance their common financial interests. The commercial corporations and the German colonial government formed a brutal alliance that exterminated 65,000 Hereros between 1904 and 1907.

In the shade of an acacia tree, a cluster of Kenyan women work busily, weaving baskets from sisal plant fibres. Their children are learning in a nearby schoolhouse. The school fees are paid by the money the mothers make from selling their baskets. Mary Masika, a widowed mother of seven, learned to weave sisal baskets from her mother. Now her weaving group is a part of the Machakos District Cooperative Union (MDCU), a union of artisan groups that market their products through the LWR Handcraft Project.

This book presents a set of case studies that cover various dimensions of the research/poverty relationship, such as the role of gender and of dialogue with policy makers. And it presents empirical evidence from a wide range of contexts, involving different regions, agroecosystems, crops, and types of technologies.

Whew! Thank you. Have scrolled and browsed accordingly. So much happening on the continent. However, I was struck by the absence of newsbites on the Sudan, Ghana, Lesotho and Botswana. PZ REPLIES: Thanks for the email - I hope that you have subsequently found stories in the areas you mention. We do our best, but can't cover every single country every single week.

The emerging trends in Namibia’s political culture offer reason for concern. The different chapters in this stock- taking volume suggest in different ways that the long struggle for national liberation and human rights has not been followed by a process towards genuine democracy and tolerance.

The "Pleasure through Reading" project uses television programmes to stimulate and promote reading in Zambia. The project is being promoted by Window Images-Media in Development in the light of growing concern that reading habits in Zambia were rapidly falling and that most Zambians ranging from school going children to adults do not read for pleasure. The organisers hoped that through “Pleasure Through Reading” a broad cross-section of people would find the programme not only interesting and educative but also challenging and motivating to the extent of taking up reading.