Zimbabwean media practitioners have launched a self-regulatory media body for journalists despite government threats of unspecified action against them. The non-governmental Media Alliance of Zimbabwe (MAZ) launched the Media Council of Zimbabwe (MCZ) earlier this month. If MCZ members have their way, the ruling Zanu-PF will cease its stranglehold on the operations of the country's media and task this autonomous body to regulate and monitor the media independently in Zimbabwe.

The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja, Nigeria has issued a hearing notice for a suit filed against the Republic of Gambia by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) on behalf of a "disappeared" Gambian journalist, Chief Ebrima Manneh, reporter of pro-government Banjul-based "Daily Observer" newspaper.

There have been promising developments in the case against judge Abdel Fatah Murad, who has filed multiple fabricated charges against the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and HRinfo, as well as bloggers and human rights and news websites, report the law center and HRinfo.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on the court in Mali's capital city of Bamako to immediately release from jail and drop charges against four editors, a journalist and a teacher for "offence against the head of state" after the publication of an article about a school assignment on a sex scandal involving a fictional president.

Malian security demonstrated their true unfriendly media colours when they pounced on a group of journalists protesting against the imprisonment of their colleagues in the capital Bamako. The riot police mercilessly assaulted the President of the Malian and West African Journalists’ Associations, Ibrahim Famakan Coulibaly.

Sierra Leone's special war tribunal, which is backed by the United Nations, has found three former military leaders guilty on 11 counts of war crimes during the 1991-2002 civil war. The verdicts on Wednesday were the first delivered by the Sierra Leone court in prosecutions arising from the conflict.

In a report carried by Al Jazeera, Ivory Coast is to distribute millions of dollars in compensation to thousands of people exposed to toxic waste dumped in its economic capital, Abidjan, last year, the presidency says. The handouts scheduled for next week and announced on Friday, come months after the government received the compensation funds

Although the roll-out date for One Laptop Per Child’s (OLPC) low-cost machine has been put back until October 2007, OLPC is using a limited number of trial machines to run pilots to gain experience of how it will work in the local context. The machine is made of tough white and green plastic, has a four-hour battery, a color screen and built-in Wi-Fi. Russell Southwood caught up last week with Antoine Van Gelder who is part of OLPC’s South African developer programme.

The recent push for computerization in Africa has come with new challenges of 'dumping' that is posing environmental hazards in many African countries. Pictures of computer dumpsites in Nigeria have arrayed fears that western countries are using Africa as a dumping ground for obsolete computers in the name of computer donations.

Following the Launch of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy, the Zambian government has pledged to provide an enabling environment to allow more private sector participation in the ICT sector.

Government services in Seychelles are undergoing a major transformation as various departments are making information and resources available online to the public. Seychelles e-government goal is to make information and communication technologies (ICT) integral to the delivery of government information, services and processes. The implementations have encountered delays since Vice President Joseph Belmont first announced it in January 2006.

Three former leaders of Sierra Leone’s former Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) have each been found guilty on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The judgments were read out in court by Justice Julia Sebutinde, the Presiding Judge of Trial Chamber II, in proceedings which lasted just over two hours.

CMFD in South Africa.

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

Building public support for genetically modified crops in sub-Saharan Africa means developing a homegrown solution to the region's own needs. Last week representatives from African countries gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, for Agricultural Science Week.

The penetration of Telecommunication services in sub-Saharan Africa remains minimal on average. For some nations like Rwanda, penetration is as low as 4 percent when compared to the country's total population figures. Some times limited telecom penetration in sub-Saharan Africa can be as a result of lacking basic telecom infrastructure in place but also simply failure, on the part of those countries with the right infrastructure, to design ample and affordable telecom products for the rural poor.

When Tony Roberts and two colleagues came up with the idea of assisting communities in less developed countries with computers, the idea was termed as 'crazy'. Roberts and his colleagues never gave up! They started Computer Aid, a UK based charity that refurbishes computers and ships them to various communities in the world. This year, the charity celebrates a decade with an aim of surpassing the 100,000 computers' mark. To date, Computer Aid has provided about 90,000 computers to various organizations, 75 per cent of them in Africa, and the numbers are rising by the day.

Uganda's Communications Commission (UCC) is to spend a total of one million dollars (USD$1 million) to connect eighty secondary schools to the Internet. "We have worked with the ministry of education and sports and have selected eighty schools that would be connected in the next financial year," said the commission?s executive director Eng. Patrick Masambu. "This is one of the key targets to be achieved by the year 2010 according to the proposed telecommunications policy," he told HANA in an interview in Kampala.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/309/Africa-Vol2_42075.jpgThree new books, African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Tejumola Olanyiyan and Ato Quayson (Blackwell Publishing 2007); and The Study of Africa. Vols 1 & 2 edited by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (CODESRIA 2006/7) are being launched on Thursday 21 June at 7.30pm at Barabara's Bookstore, 1218 South Halsted Street (lower floor of Thomas Beckham Hall), University of Illinois at Chicago.

African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory represents 'a gathering of the best critical work on African literature and larger questions of literary history, the sociology of literature, criticism and theory', according to Simon Gikandi, professor of English at Princeton University. It brings together previously published essays from Alain Ricard, Bernth Lindfors, V. Y. Mundimbe, Abiola Irele, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Naguib Mafouz, Ngugi wa Thing'o, Breyten Bretenbach, Nawal El Saadawi and Zoe Wicomb. See for details.

The Study of Africa is a two-volume work which takes stock of the study of Africa in the 21st century: its status, research agenda and approaches, and place. Volume one covers the academic disciplines, African studies and interdisciplinary studies. Volume two addresses globalisation, African studies and regional contexts. According to Bethwell Ogot, Chancellor of Moi University and Professor Emeritus of History, the publication 'provides the most comprehensive and critical analysis of African studies in the world today. Globally the book reveals a fundamental, though depressing, fact that the terms of global intellectual exchange are unequal. There is therefore a need to construct an African "library", a body of knowledge that can fully encompass, engage and examine African phenomena. And it is the responsibility of African scholars, both in the continent and in diaspora, to spearhead this struggle for intellectual decolonization and deconstruction'. For details, see http://www.codesria.org/Links/Publications/new_publications.htm.

The launch is being sponsored by the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For further details, please contact the department through www.uic.edu/las/afam/aasthome.html or Paul Zeleza, email [email][email protected].

The steering committee for the Kenya Telecentre Network (KTN) held its first meeting at Ugunja Community Resource Centre (UCRC), a telecentre located in the western part of Kenya. The main aim of the UCRC meeting was to review both the Uganda and Benin deliberations and chart a way forward on how to strengthen the Kenya Telecentre Network with a view to bridging the digital divide between rural and urban communities in Kenya and most importantly, managing and sustaining telecentres in rural areas.

The chairman of the opposition Popular Front political party, Ch'bih Ould Cheikh Malainnie, has withdrawn complaints of defamation he filed against three journalists from privately-owned Nouakchott-based newspapers. The journalists, managing editor of the daily newspaper "L'Authentique", Oumar Moctar, managing editor of the daily "Al Vejr", Tah Ould Ahmed, and managing editor of the daily "Al Alem", Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Bakar, were on 28 May interrogated by police for about one and a half hours, following a complaint against them made by Malainnie.