The 17th annual Arab Institute for Human Rights (AIHR) training course for human rights defenders in the Arab region came to a close Monday (July 30th) in the Tunisian city of Hammamet. Salhi Oussama, President of the Algerian League for Legal Thought, said, "I learned a lot during this course, which enabled us to become thoroughly familiar with human rights mechanisms and offered us the legal means with which we can confront our opponents in this field."

In three months Tanzania will be braced with one of the world's fastest, cheapest and most reliable communication technologies. This comes after the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) granted an International and National Application Services license to a newly registered firm (wireless phone and internet Service Company) known as WBS (iBurst) Tanzania.

Jocelyn Chiwenga, the wife of the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, assaulted award winning photojournalist Tsvangirai Mukwazhi at Makro Wholesalers in Harare on Wednesday. Mukwazhi was attacked while covering a tour of supermarkets by MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai, who was assessing the impact of the government’s price control war.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/broadcasts/damienugwu.jpgDamien Ugwu from the Nigerian Civil Liberties Organisation speaks to Sokari Ekine from Pambazuka News about endemic police torture in the Nigerian justice system.

CLO estimates that five people a day are being unlawfully killed by the police. Most vulnerable are unemployed youths accused of armed robbery. Damien Ugwu explores the reasons why torture and murder are common place and the cultural and political roots of the problem.

Music in this podcast is brought to you by Busi Ncube from Zimbabwe, kindly provided by .

Daudi Were, a 28-year-old Kenyan, still reads newspapers. But if he really wants to know what's happening - in African countries where newspapers are state-owned or censored - he turns to the blogs. And he's not alone. Blogs are taking off across Africa as a new tech-savvy generation takes advantage of growing internet access. The African blogosphere was, until recently, filled by the African diaspora and westerners living in Africa. But native African voices are now being heard.

Abel Mutsakani, the editor of ZimOnline and former managing editor of the banned "Daily News", is reportedly battling for his life in a Johannesburg, South Africa hospital after he was shot and seriously injured by a gang of three assailants on 23 July 2007. According to reports from ZimOnline, which publishes from South Africa, the motive behind the savage attack on Mutsakani remains unclear. "He is in a serious but stable condition," said Abel Chapatarongo, Mutsakani's deputy at ZimOnline.

There was a sharp decline in unemployment and poverty in South Africa, an annual report from the national statistics bureau has confirmed. Economists therefore believe that the country will be on course to halve unemployment and poverty within seven years if the present economic growth of 5% continues.

Circumcision is equally safe in HIV-positive and HIV-negative men, according to data from Uganda presented to the 4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Sydney on July 25th. Investigators found that there were near-identical rates of adverse-events in HIV-positive and HIV-negative men undergoing surgical circumcision by a trained medical practitioner.

Although circumcision programmes will involve significant initial costs, they will save billions of dollars in the long-term, according to a mathematical model presented to the Sydney International AIDS Society Conference on July 25th. A separate mathematical model also presented to the conference, showed that universal circumcision would have the greatest impact on HIV incidence, but that targeting circumcision at men with the most sexual partners, and those aged between 20 – 30-years would be the most effective way of reducing HIV prevalence.

In Coura, a district of Mali's capital Bamako, it's now possible to monitor the health of local infants closely in real time with the launch of a new pilot project dubbed Pesinet. Initiated and funded by Alcatel-Lucent, Fondation Orange Mali, Afrique Initiatives, Medicament Export (Medex) and Kafo Yeredeme, the project aims to provide a preventative medical diagnostic service for infants between 0-5 years, based on regular checks on the childrens' weight gain.

A new report by the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) assesses whether or not Uganda is on track to meet the information and communications technology (ICT) development objectives laid out in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Plan of Action. It provides an overview of the ICT status in the country, and presents some of the rapid changes that have happened within the country’s ICT sector. The report highlights the steps taken by the government in realising the WSIS Plan of Action, but also summarises the challenges the country faces.

A National Business plan competition and Entrepreneurship Development Programme, Believe Begin Become (BBB) has awarded a 32 year old teacher of Damongo Secondary School (DASS), Prince Yakubu Tahiru an amount of US $400,000 to establish an ICT centre in Damongo, the West Gonja District capital of the Northern Region.

On 19 July 2007, police in Lusaka prevented Q-FM, a private radio station, from mounting their Outside Broadcasting (OB) equipment to cover live a demonstration organised by the OASIS forum and Collaborative Group on the Constitution, outside the gates of Parliament. Police said that the permit issued to the conveners of the demonstration did not include mounting the OB unit for live coverage of the event.

Reporters Without Borders has voiced concern about a rapid deterioration in press freedom in Niger, especially in the north, following the imposition on 19 July 2007 of a one-month ban on the retransmission of French public radio station Radio France Internationale's (RFI) programmes throughout the country. "There have been many press freedom violations since fighting broke out in the north of the country," the organisation said.

On 13 July 2007, the High Court in Blantyre nullified the composition of the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) board because its members did not qualify for appointment. In his ruling, Judge Frank Kapanda said it was wrong for President Bingu wa Mutharika to appoint the board members while excluding old members of the board. Kapanda issued an order stopping the board members from exercising their functions and another requiring the President to comply with the Communications Act.

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, convicted a journalist in secret and ordered him to report to prison immediately. He had never been told that he was charged with a crime. On July 5, Pold Kalombo, an editor of the private weekly Le Soft International received a notice of a May 18 judgment that convicted him and his newspaper, by default, on defamation charges filed by an oil company, the director of the newspaper, Mike Mukebayi, told CPJ.

The governor of Nigeria's Imo State , Chief Ikedi Ohakim, has declared that the evolution of Information Technologies (ITs), would make the difference in the fight to reduce poverty in any country. Chief Ohakim, who spoke at the on-going 21st international conference and Annual General Meeting of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) being held at the Imo Concorde Hotel, Owerri, Imo State, under the theme "Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria: IT strategies and tools."

In a period of three years all Uganda's seventy nine districts of will be online by the year 2010, according to the information and communication technologies minister Dr. Ham Mulira. This follows the ministry's role in spearheading the development of the National Data Transmission Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) and the Electronic Government Infrastructure (EGI) project that is being implemented in phases but will eventually link all the districts of Uganda by 2010.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the arrest of Abderrahim Ariri, the publisher of the weekly "Al Watan Al An" ("The Nation Now"), and one of his journalists, Mostapha Hurmatallah, on 17 July 2007 in Casablanca after they published the text of an internal security memo circulated by the General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST), an intelligence agency.

Scarce building materials, earmarked to rehouse victims of Zimbabwe's Operation Murambatsvina, have been diverted to other projects, including work on a mansion for President Robert Mugabe in an exclusive suburb of the capital, Harare. In the winter of 2005, informal homes and markets were demolished in the ZANU-PF government's Operation Murambatsvina, aimed at clearing slums and flushing out criminals, but which left more than 700,000 people homeless or without a livelihood.