China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the country’s largest refiner, and CNOOC Ltd. agreed to buy a 20 percent stake in Angola’s offshore deepwater Block 32 for $1.3 billion from Marathon Oil Corp. Marathon, the fourth-largest U.S. oil company, will keep a 10 percent interest in the block, site of 12 announced petroleum discoveries, after the sale, which is expected to close by year- end, the companies said today in separate statements.

China is not the only power to begin to engage with Africa in recent years. The number of such emerging powers has increased to include Brazil, India, the Arab states and others, notwithstanding South Africa as a strategic African actor and Russia’s resurgence in this analysis. For this reason we have modified the name of the China–Africa Watch section of Pambazuka News to include analyses on the range of emerging powers. China–Africa Watch will now be called . Articles and news items previously published in China–Africa Watch will still be found in the section, while news summaries from other sites on the actions of emerging powers in Africa will be found in a new section, Emerging powers news.

Once again the heavy-handedness of the Kenyan police has resulted in the arrest of 27 young members of Bunge La Wananchi this week in Limuru. They were locked up for simply voicing their concern as citizens of Kenya for the accountable use of CDF funds in Kenya. Solidarity Network Kenya calls for their immediate release.

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The United Nations-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has signed a grant agreement with Togo worth $20 million over two years, the first part of a five-year grant that will allow the country to scale-up treatment and care for people living with HIV. “This agreement reflects Togo’s determination to continue its fight against the AIDS epidemic,” said Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund, who travelled to Lomé to sign the agreement.

MDC activist Patrick Danga, who was arrested by the police while restraining ZANU PF MP Patrick Zhuwawo from manhandling an MDC MP, is still detained at Harare Central police station. Zhuwawo is also Robert Mugabe’s nephew. The MDC MP for Mutare Central, Innocent Gonese, told us on Thursday that Danga has not been taken to court and is still detained, and yet the real criminals, who threw bottles and disrupted proceedings at the All-Stakeholders constitutional conference, remain free.

A group of Tunisian bloggers started a new campaign on Facebook last week to condemn censorship of the internet by the Tunisian Internet Agency and put pressure on the government to unblock the social websites YouTube and Dailymotion. Over the last few months, internet users have received "404: Page Not Found" errors when trying to surf the two websites. Observers say the motive behind the blockage might be political, coming as it does in the months before Tunisia's presidential and parliamentary elections.

Eight Malagasy women die per day while giving birth, either due to complications during the pregnancy or during delivery, according to a recently-published national Demographic and Health Survey (DHS).

Many commentators and development professionals echoed this refrain during the G8 2009 summit held in Italy from July 8 - 10. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, added his voice to the veritable cascade of dissension by declaring that the G8 “will have to update their politics to grapple with problems that none of them can solve alone: financial panic, rising food and oil prices, climate shocks, a flu pandemic, and more. Political co-operation to address these problems is …a global necessity.”

While pressure mounts for the Zimbabwean government to draft an inclusive constitution, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community in that country remains uncertain about its future in the newly formed government of national unity. Following a public statement earlier this year that called for the drafting of the new constitution to be a people driven process, it now appears that the government is willing to engage.

More than 100 magistrates and judges in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been sacked as part of President Joseph Kabila’s campaign to clean the judiciary of greasy dealings. Making the announcement this week, the Minister of Justice, Luzolo Bambi Lessa said the move was only the beginning as other sectors, including the military, were also to feel the pinch of the anti-corruption whip.

Poor food security in Akobo, the main town in Southern Sudan's Jonglei state, is being exacerbated by a huge influx of displaced people, including 19,000 who fled attacks by cattle rustlers. “The gap analysis that we have done shows that the needs are greatest among the recent IDPs,” David Tolu Lemiso, health project manager at the NGO Nile Hope Development Foundation (NHDF), said. “Out of 3,442 households from Nyandit, 2,050 are still badly in need of help, and that is minus those from Wanding, Kuechar and Ogal payams [sub-divisions].”

This latest report from the International Crisis Group examines the root cause of the country’s many crises, namely the reluctance of the long-ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to enact policies that would bring justice to the victims of its many conflicts. To end Sudan’s centralised, exploitive and unaccountable governance, the NCP must accept judicial reforms and transitional justice mechanisms as key elements of a Darfur settlement and at the same time fulfil its side of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which halted decades of civil war.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has reiterated its request for an emergency international action to put an end to the assassinations of journalists in Somalia, after the murder of Mohamud Mohamed Yusuf of the Radio Holy Quran (IQK), who was killed on Saturday July 4 in central Mogadishu.

Aid agencies in Somalia are appealing for $11 million to provide the hundreds of people displaced by fighting in the capital with emergency water and sanitation programmes, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported. Over 200,000 people have fled Mogadishu since fighting broke out between the Government and the opposition Al-Shabab and Hisb-ul-Islam groups in early May, in what the UN refugee agency has described as the biggest exodus from the capital since Ethiopian forces intervened in Somalia in 2007.

Ghana will receive around $1.1 billion in resources from the International Monetary Fund, as the country tries to reduce its widening budget deficit, a senior IMF official has said. The IMF resources include a $600 million loan over three years approved on Wednesday and another $452 million in IMF special drawing rights, IMF mission chief to Ghana, Peter Allum, told reporters on a conference call.

A recent evaluation of the World Bank’s health work is damning in its criticism of the lender’s approach, particularly in Africa. Meanwhile, the Bank is continuing to push privatisation in public services such as health, education and water, despite fierce criticism

Rwanda's post-conflict recovery has a number of impressive signposts. One is the economy, which grew at an annual rate of about 11 percent last year, according to the country's national bank. Another is the political empowerment of its women. In 2008, Rwanda elected the world's first majority-female parliament and today a woman leads the country's Supreme Court. One third of the cabinet of President Paul Kagame is female.

President Barack Obama's trip to Ghana will be rich in symbolism. But those hoping for a new direction in U.S. Africa policy are tempering their hopes with skepticism. The issue posed, parallel to that in other policy spheres, is to what extent change will remain symbolic or reflect substantive shifts, even if small, away from U.S. policies based on unilateral geostrategic goals or unexamined economic policy assumptions.

Women who sleep with women (WSW) are not at risk of HIV transmission – or are they? AIDS advocates warn that it is time for a wake-up call about who is and is not at risk. HIV prevention among WSW and lesbian women remains off the prevention agenda, said Beverley Palesa Ditsie, a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand.