In the last few months, fighting between the Congolese army and rebels has escalated, and more and more children are being kidnapped to bolster numbers amongst the various militia.

Police in southern Tanzania say they have arrested a man accused of attempting to sell his albino wife. The man was allegedly planning to sell his wife to two Congolese businessmen for around $3,000. Albinos have been living in fear in Tanzania after a series of killings due to a belief their body parts can make magic potions more effective.

Evidence is increasing that foreign forces are being drawn into the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eyewitnesses told the BBC Angolan and Zimbabwean troops were on the ground. While journalists report that some of Laurent Nkunda's rebel fighters are in the pay of the Rwandan army.

This week marks the 13th anniversary of the death of famed Nigerian activist, Ken Saro Wiwa. On November 10, 1995 Wiwa and 8 other Ogoni activists, known as the Ogoni 9 were ruthlessly executed by the then Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha. Wiwa and his colleagues were members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) who peacefully protested against Shell Oil and the Nigerian government for human rights abuses and environmental damage in their community.

Mariatu Kamara is 22, pays close attention to fashion, makeup and hairstyles, and, like many young women in Canada, is starting college. But, unlike others at her downtown campus, Kamara is doing it all without hands. Hers were hacked off in a machete attack in her native Sierra Leone a decade ago.

The Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) Adama Dieng has said Kenya must try those implicated in the Waki Report on post-election violence. He said civilians; politicians, security officers and their senior commanders are in the crosshairs of war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations and indictment in the Waki Report. Dieng said forgiving suspects named by Justice Philip Waki "in the name of peace and reconciliation" would breed impunity and future violence.

With regard to what is going on in Eastern DRCongo, it seems that most people, both inside and outside of the country, have come to accept the most horrendous crimes as part of normality. It is difficult not to ask the following question: if these rapes were occurring in G8 countries, wouldn't there be emergency measure to put an end to it? Questions must be addressed to the leadership in the DRC, the African Union leadership: why is everyone waiting for someone else to do something?

The number of people illegally crossing the Gulf of Aden and the Mediterranean Sea is on the rise, the United Nations refugee agency reported today, as it confirmed that 12 people fleeing Somalia in the past week have been found dead on a beach in Yemen and 28 others remain missing.

Thanks to some progress in the implementation of the Ouagadougou Peace Accord, internally displaced people (IDPs) in Côte d’Ivoire have continued to return home throughout the second half of 2008. Of over 700,000 counted in just five government-controlled regions in 2005, some 70,000 had returned by the end of September 2008 in the western regions of Moyen Cavally and Dix-Huit Montagnes.

Significant improvements in the security situation in northern Uganda have allowed about half of the more than 1.8 million people who had been internally displaced by the conflict to return to their villages, while another quarter have moved to transit sites nearer to their homes.

The detention of political activist Alexis Sinduhije and 36 others by Burundian police on November 3, 2008, highlights the growing obstacles to the free exercise of civil and political rights in Burundi, Human Rights Watch said today. Sinduhije, well-known as a former radio journalist, has been trying since February to form an opposition political party, the Movement for Security and Democracy (MSD).

Guinea should require its security forces to use restraint in responding to street protests, Human Rights Watch has said, after security forces opened fire on groups protesting to demand lower fuel prices. Protests on November 3 and 4, 2008 within the Guinean capital Conakry have left at least four people dead and some 20 wounded. According to witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch, numerous casualties occurred after the security forces opened fire on groups of protesters apparently in an attempt to disperse them.

Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s forces and government-backed Mai Mai militias deliberately killed civilians in Kiwanja, North Kivu province, on November 4-5, 2008, Human Rights Watch has said. UN peacekeepers based in the area were apparently unable to protect civilians from attack. Nkunda’s forces battled pro-government Mai Mai militias on November 4 and 5 in Kiwanja, killing a number of civilians trapped in the zone of conflict.

Five months after a specialised facility for multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients was established at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, the lack of isolation wards is raising concerns. "This is not the best place; TB is a highly infectious disease,” Catherine Koskei, a matron working at the facility, told IRIN. “The patients need to be restricted.”

Food, water, health and sanitation facilities at several villages on the Uganda-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border are overstretched as civilians continue to pour into Uganda, the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, said on 31 October. The agency said the facilities were inadequate for the more than 6,500 people scattered in 12 villages along the border who are being hosted by the local communities.

The UN says it has credible reports that camps sheltering 50,000 displaced people in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been torched. Aid groups say they are struggling to reach an estimated 250,000 people in the region fleeing fierce fighting between government and rebel forces. Intense diplomatic efforts are under way to end the crisis.

Along the red dirt roads looping in and out of the jungle, they trooped in their thousands. The women clutching infants to their chests and balancing rolled-up mattresses, blankets and pots on their heads. Any child old enough to walk carried a jerry can of water or dragged a sack of food.

A lack of mutual trust between the signatories remains the main challenge to implementing the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the long-running north-south civil war in Sudan, says a new United Nations report. “This lack of trust consequently permeates into all major pending benchmarks set under the Agreement,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes in his latest report to the Security Council on Sudan, which the 15-member body will discuss next month.

The arms trade provides the destructive hardware used in conflicts across the world. It undermines development, contributing to the poverty and suffering of millions. A new report by War on Want, Banking on Bloodshed: UK high street banks’ complicity in the arms trade has exposed, for the first time, the extent to which the five main British high street banks are funding this violent trade.

Fierce fighting between government and rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, the Red Cross has said. It said the number of displaced people was growing by the hour and that the precarious security situation was making it difficult to deliver aid. Intense diplomatic efforts are under way to end the crisis, which has displaced a total of 250,000 people.