Journalists Against AID (JAAIDS) Nigeria has commenced an advocacy campaign to support access to affordable treatment and care for Nigerians living with HIV/AIDS. The two-year campaign aims to secure access to HIV-related care and treatment by empowering a wide body of stakeholders with the appropriate information and skills to act on these issues.

UNU/INCORE International Summer School, 10 - 15 June 2002, Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland: Offering a structured learning opportunity based on the latest research and concepts of conflict resolution. Senior level participants from all backgrounds: practitioner, policy maker and academic are invited to attend. The deadline for
registration is 19 April 2002. The new Introduction to Northern Ireland programme from 9 - 10 June 2002 provides an introduction to peacebuilding and policy in Northern Ireland.

Six representatives of media organisations in Zimbabwe including, MISA-Zimbabwe Director, Sarah Chiumbu, The Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, Secretary General, Basildon Peta, Eunice Mafundikwa, Chairperson, Federation of African Media Women of Zimbabwe, Abel Mutsakani, President, Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe, Andrew Meldrum, Foreign Correspondents Association of Zimbabwe, and the Chairperson of the Harare Journalists Press Club, Luke Tamborinyoka presented a fresh petition to the parliament of Zimbabwe on the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Bill. The Bill was set to be passed on Tuesday, January 15. For more on the story and the full petition, read on..

Zimbabwean authorities are searching for several foreign journalists who entered the country as tourists in defiance of a ban on most visiting correspondents, a senior government official said on Thursday.

Commonwealth, European Union and United States officials have begun investigating the overseas assets of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, his family and his close associates in readiness for possible sanctions against the country.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition, has pleaded for sanctions to be imposed on his country before the presidential election in March.

Every year on December 1st we reflect on HIV/AIDS. This year Zimbabweans joined the rest of the world to commemorating World AIDS Day. The theme for this year’s campaign is “I Care, Do You?”, with a focus on young men and HIV/AIDS. Zimbabweans marked World AIDS Day with concerts, marches and fundraisers. Activities of the day were preceded by a national launch held at Murambinda growth point in Buhera District in Manicaland Province.

Children are the victims of a shocking 41% of all rapes and attempted rapes reported in South Africa. But only 9% of child rape cases result in a conviction. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), over 15% of rapes are committed against children under the age of 11. A further 26% of all reported rapes are committed against children between the ages of 12 and 17.

Belgian's final court of appeal, the Cour de Cassation, rejected on Wednesday the appeals for a retrial by a Rwandan businessman and two Rwandan nuns sentenced to prison in Brussels on 8 June 2001 for war crimes committed during the 1994 genocide.

Progress towards a resolution of the long-running conflict in the west of Uganda must now be followed up by substantial commitments aimed at improving social and economic conditions in the region. According to the findings of African Rights’ latest report, Avoiding an Impasse, Understanding the Conflict in Western Uganda, people in the west are weary and impoverished after some five years of attacks and destruction by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). Tens of thousands are still displaced from their homes. There is general approval of intensified efforts by the government to resolve the conflict, but people still feel vulnerable and neglected.

The Police force is being depleted of useful personnel by the AIDS scourge, the Inspector-General has warned.

Parents in Mt Elgon District have defied the new law barring them from circumcising their daughters under 16 years of age, Western Provincial Medical Officer (PMO), Dr Jackson Songa said.

Most Sub-Saharan African countries have reduced or eliminated fertilizer subsidies as part of the economic reform process that began in the early 1980s. Subsidy removal and currency devaluation have contributed to higher fertilizer prices. Trends in fertilizer use, however, vary by country. Benin’s farmers have increased their use of fertilizer tenfold since 1982, while Malawi’s farmers have increased use by just 30 percent during the same period. To explain these different responses to market reform, Markets and Structural Studies Division (MSSD) researchers Nicholas Minot, Mylène Kherallah, and Philippe Berry joined local counterparts to survey 800 farm households in Malawi and 900 farm households in Benin. They found that fertilizer use is closely related to crop mix.

A new CD-ROM entitled "Rural Women in Africa: Ideas for Earning Money" tries to meet the demand of providing content material to use online once rural women have access to computers. Designed as a visual "computer book," it allows the user to easily navigate using only a click of the "mouse." Developed by the International Women's Tribune Centre (IWTC) in partnership with a technical team in Uganda and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) East and Southern Africa Office in Nairobi, it is intended for use by women with minimal education and only local language fluency. Available in English and Luganda, plans call for the addition of other language tracks in the near future. To order, or for more information, contact:
IWTC/Women.

The Danish 92 Group has launched the website www.rio10.dk, which aims to promote information sharing and coordination among the organizations and networks involved in the civil society preparations for the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) 2002. The Danish 92 Group is a coalition of 21 NGOs who consider it important to support the Summit preparations in 30 developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The World Bank has warmly welcomed a new report from the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which stresses the importance of health in global economic development, the need for effective health policy reforms, and calls for a significant increase in financial resources to improve the quality of health care by poor and wealthy countries alike.

The Kaiser Family Foundation have released a policy brief, titled "Critical Policy Challenges in the Third Decade of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic," that highlights the United States' national and international challenges to and roles in addressing the pandemic. The brief, developed as part of the KFF and Ford Foundation joint initiative "AIDS at 20: A National Policy Initiative," examines several domestic and global challenges. The report is available online in Adobe PDF format.

In the name of poverty reduction, the World Bank and the IMF are seeking an expanded basis for sustaining externally driven structural adjustment plans. Our review of the actual PRSP processes confirms pre-existing doubts as to whether these processes represented fundamental changes in Bank-Fund programs and thinking. In every case examined the most important element of the PRSPs or interim PRSPs devised are the mandatory policy matrices. These orientations detail the now standardized Bank-Fund assortment of policy "reform" including liberalization, privatization, fiscal and administrative reform, assets management. Fighting poverty becomes the newest justification for the aging prescriptions geared to increasing the overall opening of the "host country" to external economic actors and free market rules.

In early 1998, the former Somaliland President's wife Edna Adan Ismail used her retirement benefits to begin constructing what would be the country’s first and only teaching Maternity Hospital. Construction of the hospital is scheduled to be completed during the spring of 2002. The currently existing maternal and gynecological facilities in Somaliland are over-crowded, ill-equipped and understaffed. The establishment of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital will provide much needed high quality reproductive healthcare, as well as standardized, professional training for the first nurses and midwives to be trained in the country in 16 years.

In an historic land claim case, the Regional Land Claims Commission in South Africa has returned nearly 700 hectares of prime land to the Getrudsburg community. The residents were forcibly removed from their community nearly 40 years ago.

Botswana is turning to Brazil to reinforce its strategy against HIV/AIDS, demonstrating that South-South cooperation is more than a slogan. The Brazilian response to the HIV/AIDS scourge has impressed experts, who have urged other countries to copy it. Botswana, with one of the world's highest rates of HIV infection, is doing just that. More than one third of its adults are infected, according to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, while the rate in Brazil is less than 1 per cent.

Braithwaite's argument against punitive justice systems and for restorative justice systems establishes that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for anticipating that well designed restorative justice processes will restore victims, offenders, and communities better than existing criminal justice practices. Counterintuitively, he also shows that a restorative justice system may deter, incapacitate, and rehabilitate more effectively than a punitive system. This is particularly true when the restorative justice system is embedded in a responsive regulatory framework that opts for deterrence only after restoration repeatedly fails, and incapacitation only after escalated deterrence fails. Braithwaite's empirical research demonstrates that active deterrence under the dynamic regulatory pyramid that is a hallmark of the restorative justice system he supports, is far more effective than the passive deterrence that is notable in the stricter "sentencing grid" of current criminal justice systems. Oxford University Press, 2001, 0-19-513639-X.

* John Braithwaite, Professor of Law, Australian National University

The Contemporary Africa Database, according to its about page, will eventually be in three parts - a database of prominent Africans, a collection of information about African institutions, and a timeline of African chronology.

This web site will provide you with information about the campaign Earthlife Africa is waging to halt the installation of Pebble Bed Molecular Reactors (nuclear reactor plants) in South Africa. Take a look.

Joe Lowry has got more gadgets than someone in the new media industry. He has a digital camera, a digital video camera, a laptop, a mobile phone and a PDA. The difference is that Joe Lowry is based in Cote D'Ivoire, West Africa, as the regional information delegate for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. And he's using technology to help coordinate humanitarian aid.

A few years ago, two paleontologists discovered in Madagascar a tiny jaw fragment that could upend the current theory of when and where the ancestors of marsupial and placental mammals arose. Senior online editor Kate Wong later traveled with the researchers as they looked for additional fossils. This week, she describes her experiences in the field and shares photos of the strange animals that inhabit the island today.

Once a tranquil backwater, the little village of Firgi on the dusty border between Niger and its southern neighbour Nigeria is enjoying a boom. The growth in this impoverished region of West Africa has been fueled by sex, and the drawback is a sharp rise in the number of people infected with HIV --the virus that causes AIDS.

While nearly three-quarters of the population earns less than $1 a day, the new foreign minister was cleared of involvement in the theft of nearly $500, 000 of public money. Almost every day, evidence surfaces to suggest Zambia's unpopular governing party rigged last month's presidential election in favor of a candidate whose sometimes bumbling syntax has earned him the nickname "the vegetable."

Rwandan authorities should immediately investigate the murder of Gratien Munyarubuga, a founder of the opposition Democratic Party for Renewal-Ubuyanja, and end harassment of other opposition and press figures, Human Rights Watch have said.

A visiting UN team has begun a series of meetings in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on "practical arrangements for the establishment and operation" of a special war crimes court in the West African country, the UN News service reported on Tuesday.

The Angolan army, FAA, has drawn closer to defeating Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement, with army sources indicating that the rebel leader is within weeks rather than months of capture. A FAA source stated that in Moxico province - in the east of the country - it has surrounded a large UNITA military contingent which it believes is protecting Savimbi.

This report presents an analysis of recent trends in migration movements and policies in OECD countries as well as in certain non-member countries. It includes a detailed description of the flows, the different channels of immigration and the nationalities of the migrants concerned. It highlights the contribution of immigration to increases in the total population and the labour force and describes the changes that have taken place in the sectoral distribution of foreign workers.

"WE ARE the devil you know," explained Levy Mwanawasa, the ruling party's presidential candidate, shortly before Zambia's election on December 27th. Not exactly an inspiring slogan, but he and the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) managed to scrape into office. With 29% of the votes, Mr Mwanawasa won just a few thousand more than his nearest rival, Anderson Mazoka, a businessman. Local and foreign observers, as well as the opposition, believe that a good bit of rigging played its part in this tight finish.

The National Clearing House on Youth Employment (NCYE) urgently needs to employ a Project Director to co-ordinate the implementation,
management and sustainability efforts of the project.

THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) has pledged continued support for Zambia under the new administration of President Levy Mwanawasa. IMF deputy managing director, Shigemitsu Sugisaki said in Lusaka that it was important for Zambia to continue having wide support until her domestic resource mobilisation was strengthened.

SANGONeT, in association with LINK Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, is offering a certificate course designed to promote computer literacy.

The Catholic Institute of Education is looking for a fieldworker for KwaZulu-Natal who will be responsible for implementing, monitoring
and evaluating the CIE's HIV/AIDS prevention programme in Catholic primary schools.

An audit of funds collected by public primary schools was ordered by the President yesterday as debate raged over whether or not pupils should pay school fees. The audit, to be carried out by the Education Ministry, will lay bare how schools spend money collected from parents.

The UN announced this week that it is creating a new unit, based in Europe, to have responsibility for internally displaced persons. An estimated 50 million people around the world have lost their homes due to war and natural disasters, but do not become refugees while they remain in their countries.

Somalia's fragile peace could unravel under the threat of United States military action, giving the upper hand to warlords opposed to recent efforts to rebuild the war-torn country, a British-based charity have said.

The benefits of debt relief have failed to trickle down to Tanzania's grassroots, where poverty remains rampant, according to the latest assessment by four anti-debt groups. In large part, the groups have found, this is because much-touted social funds provided under the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative have not been translated into better social services for the East African country's 34 million citizens.

At least 36 Nigerians died in clashes between an ethic militia group, Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC), and security forces in the southwest on Saturday, police told IRIN on Monday. Over 12 cars were also destroyed.

The Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) armed opposition movement has expelled 193 Burundians from Museke in the Ubwari Peninsula of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The UN Security Council has expressed deep concern over the mounting problems affecting the political and economic situation in the Central African Republic (CAR).

A new effort to merge two parallel but different peace efforts on Sudan under the chairmanship of Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi has emerged from last week's summit meeting of the regional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD).