I want to thank you for the noble work you are doing for African non-profit. I read about an international conference of the Canadian Council for Refugees and I applied to participate. I am pleased to inform you that I delivered a paper on trafficking on women and girls to participants from over 120 countries. Keep up the good work.

The latest environmental emergency in southern Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta has been brought under control by US specialists, Royal/Dutch Shell's Nigerian subsidiary said on Monday. The three specialists from the Houston-based Boots & Coots International Well Control company were flown in on Friday to the affected area, Yorla Fields, to deal with a blow-out at a well which shot jets of crude oil and gas 30 metres into the air for the better part of last week.

A Federal High Court in Lagos has ruled that although every Nigerian has a constitutional right to inspect the assets declaration made by public officers, the right is not enforceable until National Assembly prescribes the conditions for it exercise.

Through the thick white fog stinging with the smell of raw gas, boys clutching handkerchiefs to their noses patrol making sure no one starts an engine, takes a flash photograph or does anything that could light a spark and ignite the whole area. The continuous hiss of rushing gas, so loud that people within an arm's reach have to shout to each other, can be heard 500 metres (yards) away from the site of the oil wellhead that burst on Sunday on an Ogoniland farm in Nigeria's southeast.

Nigerian Nobel Prize winning author Wole Soyinka has an Earth Week message for the world about his homeland - at least a third of the entire country is polluted in some way.