Guinea-Bissau’s election on Sunday to replace its slain president will be a test for West Africa’s ability to stop the retreat of democracy as well as for a state destabilised by drug smugglers and army rivalries. The fact the vote is happening at all is something of an achievement within four months of President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira being shot dead and after the killing of a top contender and another senior politician during the campaign.

The Angolan government should immediately end the unlawful detention and torture of people suspected of rebel activities in the oil-rich enclave province of Cabinda, Human Rights Watch said. In the 27-page report, "‘They Put Me in the Hole': Military Detention, Torture, and Lack of Due Process in Cabinda," Human Rights Watch shows a disturbing pattern of human rights violations by the Angolan armed forces and state intelligence officials.

A magistrate court in Dakar, capital of Senegal on June 16, 2009 sentenced two journalists of the Week-End, a privately-owned weekly magazine, to three months imprisonment for defaming Mme Aida Mbodji, second deputy speaker of the country’s national assembly.

People who are HIV+ often have to cope with more than illness. Sometimes health rights are violated and access to treatment is denied or severely limited. Because of HIV+ status, there is discrimination at work. Discrimination is also suffered when it comes to housing and insurance. It is for this reason that ProBono.Org, a non-profit clearing house increasing access to justice via pro bono legal services, provides a weekly legal clinic where HIV+ people can access free legal advice and services. This service is available to people throughout South Africa. All you need to do, is call in on a Tuesday morning.

The global economic crisis has had a devastating impact on the world’s hungry. In the past year, approximately 100 million people have been added to the ranks of the roughly 1 billion people worldwide considered by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization to be undernourished, according to its report issued June 19, 2009.

This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group warns that the killings of General Tagme (the chief of defence staff) and President Vieira in March, as well as the recent assassinations of opposition leaders and former ministers, are an indication the democratic process cannot cope. The military’s use of force has overwhelmed state institutions. Both the political elites and the international community must send a strong message condemning the widespread abuses committed by the armed forces.

A Zimbabwean minister has denied any killings in the eastern Marange diamond fields, where rights groups have sounded the alarm over the forcible evictions of small-scale miners. Zimbabwe's deputy mining minister Murisi Zwizwai told a meeting of the Kimberley Process, the international scheme to curb the sale of "blood diamonds" , that the situation in Marange had been brought under control.

The United Nations Security Council should make sure that its existing commitments to protect civilians during armed conflict are actually carried out, Human Rights Watch has said in a letter to council member states. On June 26, 2009, the Security Council will hold a debate to discuss its work on civilian protection, in which all UN members can participate.

A new global report on Environment has warned that Uganda could be a total dessert in 40 years if the government fails to protect the country’s forests. Uganda has reportedly lost more than 30 percent of its forest between 1990 and 2005. The findings of the State of the Environment Report for 2008, has blamed the great loss of forest cover to human activities, which include among others agriculture, a fast growing population and rapid urbanisation.

“In politics and sociology you reach a tipping point and once you’ve reached it, things change,” says Min-whee Kang of the UN Children's Fund. “This is what we’re aiming at to stop female genital mutilation and cutting in The Gambia.” But a strong attachment to the practice in the country means anti-FGM activists must combat the custom indirectly through focusing on improving girls' and women's health and education.

An initiative that uses music and dance to convey HIV prevention messages to young people, dance4life, has won an award for Excellence in HIV/AIDS Communication in Africa from the African Network for Strategic Communication in Health and Development (AfriComNet}. "Adults are still guessing but dance4life has already taken a giant step," their press release quotes one young man, Mugalu, from Uganda, as saying.

A few weeks ago, a new piece of legislation was introduced in the US Congress, calling for development and justice in northern Uganda. While the bill boasts many excellent provisions, it also includes a statement of policy that would allow AFRICOM to pursue the Lord's Resistance Army in DR Congo. This asks members of Congress to be more attentive to the need for peace in this troubled region

With the snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro providing a backdrop under simmering tropical sunshine, a group of women in Mijongweni village break into song. The song, in Swahili, praises the benefits of protecting the environment and living in harmony with nature for the survival of generations; values vital to the survival of one of the rarest hardwood trees in the world, the African blackwood. Known to locals as mpingo, the African blackwood (dalbergia melanoxylon) is a tree that has been exploited to extinction in southern Ethiopia and Kenya and is currently only found in Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Tanzania boasts large tracts of natural forest and woodlands

It is prayer time at the Nur madrassa (Islamic religious school) in Pemba, capital of Cabo Delgado Province, on the northern coast of Mozambique. At this school, education does not stop at religious studies; on Saturdays, the malimo (teacher), Mitilage Rashid, talks to the 120 students about HIV and AIDS. In 2008 Rashid attended a course on HIV run by the Islamic Council of Mozambique, in partnership with other organizations, where he and 30 other teachers learned about the epidemic and how to conduct education campaigns at their schools.

Caroline Mbewe, 14, would prefer to be in school, but instead is a domestic worker for an affluent family in Malawi's capital, Lilongwe. "My bosses treat me well but I don't want to continue working. I want to be like their daughters; I want to go to school," she told IRIN. As in the rest of the developing world, poor families in Malawi are often forced to send their children out to earn a wage rather than complete their education.

In a letter to president Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Committee to Protect Journalists urged the Congolese government to lift its ban of RFI in the eastern cities of Bunia and Bukavu.

About 5,000 new automatic weather stations are set to be deployed across Africa, under a climate change initiative announced today by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Global Humanitarian Forum, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and mobile telecommunications companies Ericsson and Zain. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region facing the most immediate risk of droughts and floods due to climate change, according to a recent Global Humanitarian Forum report. Agricultural yields in some areas are expected to fall by 50 per cent as early as 2020.

Healthcare workers in Yambio, capital of Sudan's Western Equatoria State, have warned that the number of HIV-positive people receiving treatment has risen, and they cannot keep up with the demand for medication. About 700 HIV-positive people are being treated by a local faith-based group, the Christian Brothers. "The issue of HIV in Yambio is getting bigger and bigger every day; we even find difficulty to provide services due the big numbers of people who are infected with HIV and AIDS," said Brother Daniel Pius.

The South African health system is in deep crisis. We need a major transformation of our health system and we need it now. Problems in the public health sector are splashed across the front pages of our newspapers on a weekly basis: patients being turned away from public clinics and hospitals and some dying as a result, some provinces running out of antiretroviral drugs, the doctors’ strike, and so on.

Africa’s poor and vulnerable communities rarely have the opportunity to share their valuable experience and learn from others in broader or more formal exchanges of knowledge on climate change adaptation. The AfricaAdapt network, which is funded by the joint UK Department for International Development (DFID)/International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Climate Change Adaptation in Africa Programme , is launching its new Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund promoting new ways of sharing knowledge that can help address this problem.