Two leading activist groups in Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta oil region have accused President Olusegun Obasanjo's government of aggressively developing offshore oilfields in order to abdicate its responsibilities to the region's impoverished people.

Economic growth in least developed countries has increased from levels seen 10 years ago, but 13 countries led by Guinea-Bissau and the Solomon Islands had "regressing economies".

I read one issue, forwarded by a friend, and was impressed! Keep up the good work.

Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, has delivered a powerful speech in Nairobi to a gathering of African religious leaders from 30 countries, calling for them to fully engage and galvanize the battle against AIDS. He further called for them to take the initiative to fight the racism that lies beyond the developed world's failure to respond with urgency to the crisis.

Ahead of the European Union heads of state and government meeting in Spain on 21-22 June, EU parliamentarians have called for "utmost firmness" against the government of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in Equatorial Guinea for human rights violations.

More than 100m people in the world's poorest countries will be dragged below the basic subsistence level of a dollar a day by 2015 as they become ensnared in globalisation's poverty trap, the UN has warned. An in-depth study into the world's 49 least developed countries rejects claims that globalisation is good for the poor, arguing that the international trade and economic system is part of the problem, not the solution.

According to reports from the BBC and The Guardian, the latest World Bank investigation into the sale of a British air traffic control system to Tanzania is a "complete waste of money". The report confirms the fears of campaigners that, coming so soon after Tanzania received partial debt write-offs, the sale would squander funds better spent on poverty reduction.

Eliezer Niyitegeka, a former information minister, "went about gunning down, raping and murdering" ethnic Tutsi during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the prosecution claimed this week when the trial opened before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest organization of journalists, today called for a leading journalist on trial under draconian new press regulations to be freed and for the Government of Zimbabwe to end its "deplorable vendetta against press freedom." The IFJ says the trial of Andrew Meldrum, the Guardian's Harare correspondent, is "victimization of a respected professional."

The trial of the Guardian Zimbabwe correspondent Andrew Meldrum is likely to hit a brick wall as the state faces the dilemma of proving whether Meldrum published the story in Zimbabwe or not as the article in contention was downloaded from the internet. The defence in the case has amounted the trial to an attempt by the Zimbabwe government to inflict its repressive media laws on the rest of the world. The dilemma that the state finds itself in is based on the fact that the Guardian newspaper is unavailable in Zimbabwe, but the prosecution insists that its criminal courts have jurisdiction over editors and journalists abroad whenever their "falsehoods" are downloaded by intelligence officers who surf the net looking for "law breakers."

The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest journalist's group, and the Eastern Africa Journalist Association (EAJA), have expressed their strong concern regarding the adoption of a repressive media law in Kenya. "This unequivocal attempt by the government to control the media is appalling", said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary.

A legal battle began on Tuesday between former Nigerian military ruler, General Ibrahim Babangida, and the government over a probe into an unsolved 16 year-old murder of prominent journalist Dele Giwa, which occurred during Babangida's reign. Nigeria's Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC) in its report to President Olusegun Obasanjo last month recommended the prosecution of Babangida and two former intelligence chiefs for the murder of Giwa by parcel bomb in his Lagos home on 19 October 1986.

This is the first call for applicants for Adilisha distance learning courses for human rights and advocacy organisations in southern Africa. Fahamu, in association with the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, will be offering courses specifically designed to meet the needs of human rights and advocacy organisations in southern Africa. Developed together with international and regional experts, seven courses will be run in the course of the next 12 months.

In the aftermath of the deeply flawed March 2002 presidential election, Zimbabwe has dropped off the radar screen of most policy-makers and media but its crisis is deepening:

- the ruling ZANU-PF party and the government are systematically using violence to intimidate the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and civil society in order to punish and compel them to accept the results;

- the economy is further deteriorating as foreign investment and food both become scarce commodities; with regional drought compounding the land seizure crisis, UN agencies warn of possible famine; and

- as the opposition considers mass protests, the prospect of serious internal conflict is becoming imminent, with grave implications for the stability of the wider Southern African region.

The international response has been mixed and inadequate. South Africa and Nigeria, who made possible the Commonwealth's suspension of Zimbabwe in the immediate aftermath of the election, have attempted throughout the spring to facilitate party-to-party talks between ZANU-PF and the MDC. Many African governments, however, have given barely qualified if slightly embarrassed approval to President Mugabe's re-election while trying to minimise Zimbabwe's relevance to their efforts to construct new economic relationships between the continent and the rest of the world.

Most Western countries have done little except repeat rhetorical condemnations that appear, counter-productively, to have persuaded Mugabe that their policies are "all bark, no bite" and to have increased sympathy for him in much of Africa. The European Union (EU) and the United States (U.S.) have meaningfully expanded neither the target list of affected individuals nor the scope for the sanctions (primarily travel restrictions) they imposed on senior ZANU-PF figures before the election. Key G-8 countries have signalled in advance of their 26-27 June 2002 summit that they may be prepared to relax the requirement that African states apply serious peer pressure on Zimbabwe as a precondition for advancing the New Program for Africa's Development (NEPAD) initiative on which the continent pins its hopes for integration into the world economy.

The party-to-party talks initially made progress. An agenda was agreed, and the facilitators had begun to explore ideas, built around a transitional power sharing arrangement, to pursue constitutional reform and restructure the presidency to require new elections while finessing the MDC's requirement for a rerun of the March poll and ZANU-PF's insistence Mugabe's victory be accepted. However, the talks collapsed in May when ZANU-PF withdrew, demanding that the MDC drop its court challenge to that result.

The substantive gap is considerable, and ZANU-PF is carrying out repressive actions around the country that heighten tension and damage the environment for any negotiation. The MDC entered talks despite considerable scepticism at its grassroots - based on those actions and earlier history - that the governing party intends anything except to destroy or co-opt it. Serious internal fissures and pressures now threaten to radicalise the MDC's strategy. Its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has begun to speak of switching to mass public protests within weeks if there is no movement toward new elections. Every indication is that this would produce a sharp ZANU-PF response that would set off a cycle of much more serious domestic conflict, refugees across borders, and further economic decline.

In these circumstances, it is vital for the international community to focus its efforts with renewed urgency on defusing the immediate crisis. The most promising avenue, if only for lack of any realistic alternative, is presented by the party-to-party talks. South Africa and Nigeria need to become much more assertive in encouraging ZANU-PF to return to the negotiating table and both sides to pursue genuine compromises. In particular, they need to use more of their considerable political leverage to push the governing party to improve the negotiating environment by ending the widespread violence for which it is responsible. By so doing they will also gain credibility with the MDC that can be used at a later stage to broker agreements.

Other African states should give full support and make clear that President Mugabe will be isolated if he does not end the political violence and negotiate in good faith. The Africans should also use Qadhafi's desire to be accepted as a statesman to encourage Libya to cut off material support that encourages Mugabe's intransigence.

His fellow African leaders, especially Presidents Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria, have most of the real leverage that can influence Mugabe. However, the EU, U.S. and other friends of Zimbabwe can play important roles by focusing on helping the facilitators get the party-to-party talks back on track within the next several weeks. They should mute the rhetoric but toughen and extend targeted sanctions; make clear there will be no progress on NEPAD at the G-8 Summit unless Africans put more pressure on ZANU-PF; and (especially the British) pledge anew to contribute significantly, in the context of an overall settlement, to land reform in Zimbabwe - which is a genuine issue though one cynically abused by the ruling party.

They should also offer assistance that strengthens civil society and helps provide unemployed young people with economic alternatives to joining the ruling party's militias. These middle and longer term objectives, however, must be subordinated to the immediate priority of heading off an increasingly dangerous confrontation this summer.

Zimbabwe is not a lost cause. Conflict prevention based on democracy, rule-of-law, and a functioning economy can succeed, but only if the key international actors, led by the Africans themselves, throw their full weight behind a genuine negotiating process before the grievances are taken into the streets.

Home affairs minister Lackson Mapushi has announced the formation of a police complaints authority and an anti-money laundering authority to check executive excess by police or drug enforcement commission officers.

Australia will provide AUS $10 million (US $5.5 million) for projects to improve food security in Southern Africa, the government's aid arm, AUSAID, said in a statement.

Around 25,000 Liberians have crossed into neighboring Sierra Leone since Janaury, seeking to escape a civil war in their West African home, a U.N. official said Wednesday. Liberia's rebels have stepped up attacks recently against President Charles Taylor's government, and fighting has been reported in five of the country's 15 counties.

The clouds of smog that daily blur the skyline of the central business area of Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos, are the most obvious signs that air pollution is a major problem in one of Africa's biggest cities. Less obvious is the increasing toll on the health of the city's 12 million residents.

Burkina Faso and the Netherlands government signed an agreement on Thursday, in which the Dutch government would provide 21 billion cfa (US $30 million) to support a three year poverty reduction strategy.

The African Development Bank has approved a grant of about US $1.5 million to finance a water and sanitation study in The Gambia, a news release from the Bank said on Wednesday.

Yield (Youth Information Education Learning & Development) has launched a new 10-day HIV/AIDS peer education programme for interested organizations. Yield specializes in providing the highest standards of training and development, internationally in sexual health, relationship and gender based programmes to meet the needs of overseas organizations. The new programme aims to develop networks of peer educators and enable as many young people as possible, with their enthusiasm, creativity, energy and newly acquired knowledge to contribute to the reduction of HIV/AIDS problems in their settings.

The Uganda People's Defence Forces is not bound by time in its pursuit of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) inside Sudan, where the LRA had bases from which it was launching attacks in northern Uganda, an army spokesperson has said. Under an agreement concluded between the Ugandan and Sudanese governments in March, the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) were authorised to pursue the LRA inside Sudanese territory, within limited periods.

Despite the misery being caused by the Sudanese civil war - Africa's longest-running and bloodiest - very little is being done to end the suffering of the helpless and innocent, Henry J. Hyde, chairman of the US Committee on International Relations, has told a special Congressional hearing on Sudan. "Somewhere in that land of misery today, a child will die, a mother will lose a limb and young women will be enslaved," he said.

A series of resources on why women become sex workers, and how they can get out, from the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN).

Rwanda has launched an 18-month programme to combat gender and sexual violence, the minister of gender and women's development, Angeline Muganza, said on Thursday from the capital, Kigali. The US $627,379 USAID-funded project, launched on Tuesday, has four components. One of these is to conduct a survey in August for women of reproductive age covering the period before and after the genocide of 1994. The results would assist in understanding how women in this category had experienced sexual violence during the specified periods, the similarities and differences in terms of who was affected, who perpetrated the offences, where, when, and why, USAID-Rwanda reported on Thursday.

The Zimbabwe government is to investigate allegations that cabinet ministers, officials from the ruling ZANU-PF and war veterans have extorted millions of dollars from white commercial farmers to avoid eviction or the sale of their land.

The Southern Cameroon National Council (SCNC), which advocates autonomous rule for Anglophone Cameroon, has called for the electorate in that part of the country to boycott parliamentary and council elections slated for 23 June.

Lawyers in Swaziland have lodged a complaint with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) against the human rights record of King Mswati's regime. "The government should prepare itself to go and explain... why there is blatant disregard for the basic and fundamental rights of citizens," a representative for the lawyers said.

Malawian President Bakili Muluzi has warned donor countries that he will not let foreign governments take advantage of the country's poverty to dictate how he runs Malawi, the Pan-African News Agency reported.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who recently returned form a 12-day tour of Africa with Irish rock star Bono, says that the United States has a "moral duty" to assist developing nations in Africa in dealing with problems such as HIV/AIDS and poverty when local leaders are "committed to solving problems."

Ethiopia is to be the headquarters for the newly formed Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism for the regional body, Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

Rwandan-backed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC) have accused a rival group allied to the Kinshasa regime of massacring nearly 400 civilians last week in the northeastern Ituri region. "The Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) denounces the widespread massacring of the civil population near Bunia by the RCD-ML led by Mbusa Nyamwisi and allied to the forces of the Kinshasa government," the rebels said in a statement in Kigali.

The United Nations appealed again to Kenya on Friday to move some 5,000 Somali refugees out of a ramshackle camp on the border close to where fighting continues on the Somali side. Some 17 refugees, mainly children, have died of disease and malnutrition in the camp in less than a week, according to spokesman Kris Janowski of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Amadou Toumani Toure has been sworn in as the new president of Mali, during a ceremony in the capital Bamako on Saturday attended by 11 other francophone African leaders. Making democratic history, Malians witnessed for the first time one constitutionally elected leader handing power to another duly elected president.

The trial of two former Mpumalanga officials accused of accepting nearly R540 000 in kickbacks for irregularly approving a multi-million rand tender has been delayed for the fourth time because court recordings weren't finalised. The Nelspruit regional court postponed the trial of former environmental affairs department head Jabulani Mhlongo and administrative director Donald Hlatshwayo to June 18.

The WSIS Gender Caucus consists of representatives of organisations that responded to an invitation by UNIFEM to contribute to ensuring that gender dimensions are included in the process of defining and creating a Global Information Society that contributes to sustainable development and human security.

One of the many problems the present government faced when it seized power in 1994 was what to do with the thousands of children who were orphaned by war, genocide and now AIDS. Many of these children are not in orphanages, but roam the streets in one of the poorest countries in the world. Theophane Nikyema, the representative of the United Nations Children's Fund(UNICEF) in Rwanda, on 6 June gave IRIN his views on the situation of children in the country.

OVER 50% of children below 10 years of age have been sexually abused, the chairman of Uganda Child Rights NGO Network (UCRNN), Basil Kandyomunda, has said.

Women lawyers in the country have called on the Federal Government to seek judicial interpretation of the constitution on the issue of Sharia legal system in order to prevent continued human rights abuse on its implementation. The female lawyers made the call in Abuja when they visited President Olusegun Obasanjo under the umbrella of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA).

Almost a month after the special session, the final version of the much-awaited outcome document - A World Fit for Children - has been released.

Southern Africa is a region of enormous natural wealth. So why are 13 million people facing starvation? Drought and floods are certainly to blame, but man-made calamities, such as the decision of the authorities in Malawi to sell off a strategic 167,000-tonne grain reserve and President Robert Mugabe's controversial land seizures in Zimbabwe, have played a big part.

Of the myriad issues on the table for a U.N. summit in August that aims to cut world poverty and save the environment,few are as critical as getting safe drinking water to the 1.1 billion people who go without it. The European Union has warned the world was in a global water crisis and made the issue a priority for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and also at final preparatory talks here on Indonesia's resort island of Bali.

The fourth and final preparatory meeting for the Earth Summit has ended in Bali with no final agreement - abandoning the planet on the road to ruin, says Friends of the Earth.

The Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency released a report last week, quietly and without any fanfare, acknowledging that global warming not only exists, but that it has us on a path to certain disaster. The EPA even offered a solution - get used to it.

While industrial products like chlorofluorocarbons are largely responsible for current ozone depletion, a NASA study finds that by the 2030s climate change may surpass chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main driver of overall ozone loss.

A senior official in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism says climate change and unsustainable use of resources are creating major challenges for Namibia. Speaking at the official launch of the World Environmental Day in Windhoek Under Secretary in the Department of Natural Resources, Maria Kapere, said climate changes in Namibia will force changes in the distribution of species and habitats along Namibia's escarpment where most of the country's unique species occur.

Food, that most basic of human needs, is in critically short supply for nearly one in every eight people on Earth. "Every day, more than 800 million people worldwide - among them 300 million children - suffer the gnawing pain of hunger, and the diseases or disabilities caused by malnutrition," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told delegates at the World Food Summit: Five Years Later, which took place in Rome.

Liberian President Charles Taylor said on Monday his forces had captured a northern rebel stronghold, but a rebel spokesman denied the claim. Rebels have stepped up their campaign against Taylor in recent months with attacks near the coastal capital Monrovia.

The resettlement of internally displaced Sierra Leoneans in the formerly inaccessible districts of Kono and Tonkolili started on Tuesday last week and will continue to the end of June, an official in the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Activities (OCHA) told IRIN.