Congo News

New reports from the UN and analysts in India, Washington and London estimate that at least 30m hectares is being acquired to grow food for countries such as China and the Gulf states who cannot produce enough for their populations.

A clinical trial is being launched in three African countries of a drug that could eliminate onchocerciasis, or river blindness, one of the leading infectious causes of blindness across Africa.

Rights groups say they have received many reports of intelligence agents abusing detainees.

Former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba is due to appear on Monday before the International Criminal Court, where he faces war crimes charges of rape, torture and pillaging during civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

BRAZZAVILLE, 30 June 2009 - Barely two weeks before presidential elections in the Republic of Congo, Marcel Kombo decided to send his wife and children away from Brazzaville.

JOHANNESBURG, 29 June 2009 - Signatories to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme - an international initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds - restated their commitment to the scheme at the close of a three-day meeting in Namibia on 26 June, but campaigners warned that more action, not talk, was needed now.

NAMIBIA has a revenue ace up its sleeve and therefore won't be pressurised into signing an interim economic partnership agreement with the European Union at the expense of regional integration and unity within the Southern African Customs Union , Trade and Industry Minister Hage Geingob said.

BRAZZAVILLE: Authorities in the Republic of Congo yesterday said they had collected almost 900 weapons from ex-rebels on the outskirts of the capital, as election campaigning formally got under way.

A refugee family in a makeshift shelter in eastern Chad. The United States will accept hundreds of the most vulnerable for resettlement 23 June 2009 &#150 As part of a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees programme, the first group of refugees has left Chad to begin new lives in the United States.

War and armed violence is taking an alarming toll on civilians in conflict-affected countries across the globe, according to new findings published by the International Committee of the Red Cross today .

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered two biochemical pathways that the Ebola virus relies on to infect cells.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo called on the Government to take urgent measures to improve prison security and improve conditions for inmates, after several women were assaulted during an attempted escape from Goma's central prison last night.

The European Union will not send observers to Congo's presidential election, a delegation of Euro-deputies visiting Brazzaville said on Sunday.

El Haji Omar Bongo Ondimba, the diminutive President of Gabon, passed on last week at 73.

Congo's Constitutional Court rejected four candidates, including that of the main opposition party, from contesting the July 12 presidential vote, state radio announced on Friday.

United Nations agencies and their partners today launched an appeal for $38 million to help nearly 1 million people in need of assistance amid armed attacks and military operations in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo .

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was jeered as he joined heads of state in the capital of Gabon, Libreville, for the funeral of President Omar Bongo.

The prosecution contends that Bemba's actions in the Central African Republic [BBC backgrounder] as military leader of the Congo Liberation Movement [party website, in French] from October 2002 to May 2003 amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The number of people internally displaced within their own countries has reached a historical high of more than 28 million, the UN's refugee agency said today, as conflicts in Pakistan 's Swat valley and Sri Lanka compound a growing global problem.

Librvuille - Gabon was set to pay its final respects on Tuesday to Omar Bongo Ondimba, with a state funeral for the former president who ruled the oil-rich equatorial African country for 41 years.