Study papers presented at a two-day consultative workshop organised by the World Bank (WB) and the Ministry of Capacity Building (MoCB) revealed that Ethiopia stood lowest among developing countries in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

West and central African cotton-producing countries have applied to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for financial compensation from industrialised nations whose agricultural subsidies threaten the survival of their cotton industry.

Activists of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress opposition party in Kinshasa physically assaulted Baudoin Kamenda, a Radio France Internationale correspondent.

A journalist of Radio Television Nationale Congolaise sustained serious injuries during a beating by local authorities in the eastern city of Kindu in Maniema Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, a local source told IRIN that Dieudonne Bulongo Muzaliwa was making a good recovery.

The Zimbabwe Supreme court has passed a landmark judgment against the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act by declaring Section 80 unconstitutional. The full bench of the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Daily News reporter Lloyd Mudiwa and former Editor in Chief of the same paper, Geoff Nyarota.

What are the characteristics of a Web site that make a person decide the information at the site is credible? Recent research indicates that not all people make the decision of credibility using the same criteria.

With 54 journalists killed in 2002 and 23 journalists killed since the start of this year, 14 of them during the war in Iraq, the need for increased safety for the media has never been more urgent. According to IPI's statistics, since 1997, 352 journalists have been killed at the rate of nearly 5 per month, many of them in the most appalling of circumstances. In breaking down the total figure for deaths from 1 January 1997 to 19 April 2003, 43 journalists were killed in Africa, 109 in the Americas, 76 in Asia, 85 in Europe, and 39 in the Middle East and North Africa.

In a letter sent to South African President Thabo Mbeki, Chairman of the African Union, ARTICLE 19 has raised its concerns about the continued detention, incommunicado and without trial, of at least eighteen journalists and eleven political dissidents in Eritrea since September 2001.

Police authorities in Delta State have arrested the proprietor of a private radio station and four others over their alleged role in the broadcast where the Alliance for Democracy governorship candidate, Chief Great Ogboru, was declared winner of recent elections.

The Kenyan people provided to the African continent and the world an example of peaceful, democratic transition when President Mwai Kibaki, who will open the IPI World Congress in Nairobi, Kenya (1 to 4 June 2003), won a landslide victory in the December 2002 general elections. As Kenya turns a new page, prominent politicians, experts, and leading members of the world's media community will gather in Nairobi to discuss current issues related to the challenges facing Africa and the world, including a very timely subject, "Reporting on Regions of Conflict". In this session, panelists will discuss, amongst other things, recent experiences in Iraq, where news organisations had in place both journalists "embedded" with U.S. and British troops and free roaming or "unilateral" reporters who operated under very different circumstances.

The Centre for Social Science and Medicine in collaboration with the Institute of Public Health University of Dar es Salaam, is offering a three-week Research Methodology training course for people involved in health research and health related activities. The objective of this course is to equip / strengthen the research capacity of participants in order to facilitate development of a holistic approach to health related problems in developing countries.

As the world commemorated Press Freedom Day, Zimbabwe’s independent media community highlighted the gross erosion of essential democratic liberty in the country. The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ) condemned the government’s persecution of privately owned media institutions and their staff through the selective application of unconstitutional and anti-democratic legislation and its blatant abuse of the publicly owned national broadcasting station, ZBC, and Zimbabwe Newspapers titles as messengers of its own propaganda at the expense of the truth.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Mocks Shivute, has told managers at the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation to improve their coverage of rural areas.

Access to Information and Communication Technologies in Africa received a shot in the arm when the Canadian-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC) launched a R63mn project last week, reports ITWeb.The project, launched at an African networking conference in South Africa, will apply Canadian ICT expertise to projects for education, health and community development. The connectivity project is the latest addition in a series of projects under the Acacia Programme banner.

Buoyed by good market prices, maize farmers in Uasin Gishu are turning to planting passion fruits, which they say are also cheaper to maintain. Already, officers from the National Agriculture and Livestock Extension Programme, implementing a new bottom-up approach towards sustainable agriculture in the district, are at select focal areas in the district encouraging farmers to develop home-grown solutions to some of their problems. Funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) the new extension approach allows the full participation of the beneficiaries and encourages farmers to form interest groups to address any emerging problems.

That's the question. And it arises since Clarin.com from Argentina has set up a public weblog, where anybody can add a comment. The weblog site is hidden in a tiny link on the front page, which takes you to the weblog front page. There you can see news items, all of them about technology issues, and you can post what you think. As in a forum. So, can we talk about this as a weblog? What's the difference?

ERC-L is a monthly e-mail newsletter about new resources for human rights education and training on the web site of Human Rights Education Associates (HREA). HREA's Resource Centre consists of: a Library; a Forums section with various discussion lists related to human rights and human rights education; a Human Rights Education Links section; and a Databases section. If you have questions or feedback, please contact us at: [email protected].

- Seven months after Zambia rejected genetically modified foods and banned American transgenic food donations from entering its territory, the Zambian government has developed a National Biosafety and Biotechnology Strategy Plan.

What's the best way to avoid spam email? Hide, says the Centre for Democracy and Technology. In its report, "Why Am I Getting All This Spam?" CDT outlines techniques used by spammers and explains the results of simple techniques used to circumvent the unwanted messages.

The online daily Wal Fadjri has relaunched itself. Part of Sonatel Multimedia, it claims that the new version is qualitatively better than the old version. It is now possible to listen to Walf FM on the internet using streaming from its site but according to Osiris, it still suffers some problems with there being different versions of Flash used on the site.