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.

Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network has the pleasure of announcing the launch of its blog platform, Zimbabwe Women's Voices. The blog will begin on the Constitutional Reform Process and seeks to provide Zimbabwean women and community at large an opportunity to voice their perspectives on the Constitutional Reform process between now and November 2009 when public consultations are scheduled to be complete.

The Gambian Press Union (GPU) has in a statement issued on June 12, 2009 condemned President Yahya Jammeh’s deliberate attempt to vilifying Deyda Hydara, editor and a former critic of his repressive administration, brutally murdered in 2004 by unknown assailants, immediately after his newspaper celebrated its 13th anniversary.

On 15 June 2009, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court confirmed some of the charges brought by the Prosecutor against Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo for crimes committed on the territory of the Central African Republic from on or about 26 October 2002 to 15 March 2003.

The mandate of the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences (SRVAW) must be strengthened if the elimination of all forms of violence against women is to become a reality. This was a key recommendation from the parallel event ‘15 years of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women: gains, challenges and the way forward’ held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland on June 5, 2009, in parallel to the 11thsession of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).

This is a photo essay of the recent occupation of a piece of land in Macassar. On Tuesday 19th backyarders in Macassar, desperate for homes, built shacks on municipal land on a field adjoining the N2

During the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese relations with African countries were driven by ideological considerations, with China presenting itself as an alternative to both the West and the Soviet Union. During that time, China’s support consisted mainly of moral and material support for liberation struggles. During the 1980s, the relationship shifted towards economic co-operation based on common aims. After the end of the “Cold war”, China attached importance to both political and economic benefits and portrayed itself as an attractive economic partner and political friend.

The Comoros autonomous islands will hold legislative and local government elections on 2 August, the permanent representative of the African Union (AU) in Moroni, Mourad Taiati has told journalists. The AU official, who was speaking at the end of a meeting in Moroni with the Comoran Foreign Relations Minister, Ahmed Ben Said Jaffar, stressed that the elections were the expression of a “fervent wish” of the Comoran authorities.

Five more people have died of their injuries after a suicide attack on the Somali security minister, bringing the total number of dead to 35. Omar Hashi Aden was buried hours after the blast at a hotel in Beledweyne, north of the capital, Mogadishu. The funerals for some of the other victims, who included Somali diplomats, are being held on Friday.

The Tanzanian and Ugandan governments should ensure that refugees living in camps due to close on June 30 and July 31, 2009 are not forcibly returned to their home countries and are immediately given full information about their options, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch also urged both governments to avoid repeating Rwanda's unlawful forced return of up to 504 refugees to Burundi at gunpoint on June 2, after it closed its last refugee camp for Burundians.

An international coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), mostly comprised of women’s groups, is calling for a "gender equitable" response to the global financial crisis, which is to be debated at a UN summit of world leaders next week. "The United Nations, not the international financial institutions (IFIs), must lead this process," Gigi Francisco, general coordinator of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), told IPS.

Egypt has asked the African Development Bank (AfDB) for a budgetary support loan to offset the impact of the global economic crisis, a senior bank official said on Friday."We are in discussions over a budget support loan with the Government of Egypt to address the impact of the financial crisis and to support the reforms that are under way," Gabriel Negatu, the AfDB's financial reforms director, said.

Mozambique has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates, with more than ten percent of babies not reaching the age of one, according to the United Nations Children Fund’s 2009 State of the World’s Children Report. The main cause of child death in Mozambique is malaria, closely followed by HIV/AIDS, the report states.

Greenpeace is pleased to announce the appointment of two prominent African activists into senior positions in the organisation, Kumi Naidoo as Executive Director of Greenpeace International, and Michelle Ndiaye Ntab as Executive Director of Greenpeace Africa. Kumi Naidoo from South Africa and former General
Secretary of CIVICUS(1), will take over from Gerd Leipold in November 2009, and Michelle Ndiaye Ntab from Senegal assumed her appointment in April.

2008 was the Year of African Youth, yet the African Youth Charter, adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union in July 2006, has still only been ratified by 13 countries –needing two more ratifications before it can enter into force. In January 2009, the Assembly declared the years 2009-2019 as the decade of youth development in Africa.

On the occasion of Day of the African Child, the Africa Public Health Alliance & 15%+ Campaign is calling on African governments to end the "5 by 5 Tragedy" of an estimated 5 million African infants and children under the Age of 5 dying annually of preventable, manageable or treatable health causes. Rotimi Sankore Coordinator, Africa Public Health Alliance & 15%+ Campaign stated: "While there may have been some progress over the years on infant and child mortality, such progress is clearly not enough and there is nothing to celebrate today."