According to a report appearing in the South China Morning Post, Beijing authorities are secretly planning to ban black people and others it considers social undesirables from entering the city’s bars during the Olympic Games, a move that would contradict the official slogan, “One World, One Dream”. Bar owners near the Workers’ Stadium in central Beijing say they have been forced by Public Security Bureau officials to sign pledges agreeing not to let black people enter their premises.

Reproductive rights advocates issued a collective condemnation Tuesday of a draft proposal by the Bush administration to set new restrictions on domestic family planning programs. Under the draft proposal, federally funded hospitals and clinics that provide family planning services would be required to promise in writing that they will turn a blind eye to health care providers' views on abortion and certain kinds of birth control, such as emergency contraception.

Full scale work by the Chinese begins to rebuild 2,050 miles of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo, left to rot in the rainforest after the Belgian colonialists pulled out 48 years ago and further shattered by seven years of war. The vast project, which will triple Congo's current paved road network, is part of China's largest investment in Africa, a £4.5 billion infrastructure-for-minerals deal signed in January.

There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless.

People continue to be enslaved in northern Mali, according to Malian human rights organization Temedt, despite a widespread belief that slavery no longer exists in the country. "The government believes slavery ended with independence, when many of the people who had been living as slaves in the colonial period were freed," said Temedt president Mohammed Ag Akeratane, "but I would estimate there are still several thousand people living in slavery or slavery-like conditions in modern Mali."

The European Commission backed a plan on Friday to give 1 billion euros to farmers in Africa next year to help tackle high food prices and boost output, despite opposition by many EU states. The EU cash, largely the result of underspending and leeway in the bloc's massive agriculture budget, comprises 750 million euros earmarked for 2008 and the remainder for 2009. This year's amount could be given retrospectively from mid-June.

The 24th World Conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association will be held in Vienna, November 3 to 6, 2008. It will be co-organised by local member group Hosi-Wien. Its theme will be “Organising locally to bring on global change”.

The government in Niger has signed an agreement for China to help improve the country's power supplies.China will transfer several electrical power units to Niger under the agreement, officials said. The deal comes as Niger's cities have been experiencing power outages, partly due to problems in supply from Nigeria.

Debt campaigners from around the world have called on G8 leaders to face up to their role in creating the food crisis and climate change, as they meet in Japan. They call on the G8 to cancel the debts of those countries most seriously affected by the food crisis, and not to run up new debts in trying to solve the problems of food price rises and climate change.

International aid workers have temporarily suspended their work at a village in eastern Chad following attacks on their compounds and ethnic violence, British aid agency Oxfam said on Friday.

Governments and advocacy groups rallied to lobby leaders of of the G8 for billions of dollars to help prevent maternal deaths, the leading killer of women of childbearing age in developing nations. The G-8 economic summit of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States convened for three days beginning July 7 in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan.

This South Centre Analytical Note looks at the donor-driven agenda in the reform of public procurement – the rules that guide government purchasing of goods, works and services – as one of major components in the good governance agenda being incorporated by donors into their aid programmes. It further stresses that such an agenda vis-à-vis government procurement not only restricts the flexibility of developing country governments to use public procurement as a policy tool for development, but also has significant consequences for local firms that rely on government contracts.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has made notable progress in bringing justice for the worst crimes despite mistakes in policy and practice, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today that assesses the court’s first five years. Human Rights Watch urged greater international support of the ICC to meet the political and financial challenges ahead.

The IMF said on Tuesday it needed to evaluate the impact on Democratic Republic of Congo's economy of a huge recent Chinese loan and investment deal before it could conclude a formal accord with the African state. The International Monetary Fund's country representative for Congo, Xavier Maret, said the $9 billion mining and infrastructure partnership with China signed by Kinshasa this year had raised questions about Congo's level of indebtedness.

Black business and professional organisations have expressed their dissatisfaction with the Pretoria High Court judgement characterising Chinese South Africans as ‘coloured’, thus qualifying them as beneficiaries in terms of black economic-empowerment, and called on the State “to appeal this irrational decision”.

The Management Board of Giesecke & Devrient GmbH, Munich, today decided to cease delivering banknote paper to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe with immediate effect. The company has taken this step in response to an official request from the German government and calls for international sanctions by the European Union and United Nations.

The chocolate industry has failed to provide consumers with a reasonable assurance that the chocolate they buy was made without exploited and trafficked child labor. Major chocolate companies signed what is referred to as the Harkin-Engel Protocol in 2001, promising to eliminate the worst forms of child labor from their supply chains, after media stories emerged depicting the widespread use of forced child labor and trafficking on West African cocoa farms. After failing to meet their July 1, 2005 commitments, the Protocol was weakened and extended to July 1, 2008. Once again, the industry has missed the deadline.

Leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations are set to backtrack on their landmark pledge at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to increase development aid to Africa to $25bn a year. A draft communiqué obtained by the Financial Times, due to be issued at the group's July summit in Hokkaido, Japan, shows leaders will commit to fulfilling "our commitments on [development aid] made at Gleneagles" - but fails to cite the target of $25bn annually by 2010.

Energy-hungry China and the United States, the world’s two greatest oil consumers, are jockeying for influence over Africa’s vast economic potential. But as the two rivals sink their business hooks into the continent, soldiers from the two nations have also rubbed elbows there.

Earlier this month in Washington D.C., Thomas J. Christensen (Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs) and James Swan (Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs) briefed the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on China’s growing presence in Africa and its impact on U.S. policy.