The trial of the Guardian Zimbabwe correspondent Andrew Meldrum is likely to hit a brick wall as the state faces the dilemma of proving whether Meldrum published the story in Zimbabwe or not as the article in contention was downloaded from the internet. The defence in the case has amounted the trial to an attempt by the Zimbabwe government to inflict its repressive media laws on the rest of the world. The dilemma that the state finds itself in is based on the fact that the Guardian newspaper is unavailable in Zimbabwe, but the prosecution insists that its criminal courts have jurisdiction over editors and journalists abroad whenever their "falsehoods" are downloaded by intelligence officers who surf the net looking for "law breakers."

The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest organization of journalists, today called for a leading journalist on trial under draconian new press regulations to be freed and for the Government of Zimbabwe to end its "deplorable vendetta against press freedom." The IFJ says the trial of Andrew Meldrum, the Guardian's Harare correspondent, is "victimization of a respected professional."

Two independent radio producers, one based in Tanzania and the other in Burundi - respectively Studio Ijambo and Radio Kwizera - are to collaborate in order to use radio as "a tool of conflict prevention, and reconciliation". The collaboration would include programme-sharing, co-productions, exchanges of journalists and a correspondent network, a statement issued on Thursday said.

The American lawyer who won compensation for Holocaust victims is about to launch legal claims for billions of pounds against companies, many of them British, that benefited from apartheid.
The first action will be announced at a press conference tomorrow by Dorothy Molefi, mother of the most famous casualty of the 1976 Soweto student uprising, Hector Petersen, who at the age of 13 was the first student shot dead by police in 1976. The photograph of his bloodstained body cradled in the arms of a friend, with his tearful sister running alongside, came to be the symbol of student resistance.

WOUGNET has obtained two spots in a web design course to be conducted July
15-21, 2002 in Kampala. The training is to be conducted by OneWorld Africa - the OneWorld center in Africa. OneWorld is an international non-governmental, non profit making media NGO whose mission is to harness the democratic potential of the internet to promote human rights and sustainable development.

When talking about information and communication technologies (ICTs) being used to achieve sustainable development in African countries, what normally comes to mind is the telecommunications and utility service sectors. Charlotte Kawesa describes how the Ugandan government, with support from IICD, is incorporating ICTs in teacher training.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the African superplume - a massive, hot upwelling of rock beneath southern Africa - has edges that are sharp and distinct, not diffuse and blurred as previously thought. Such sharp, lateral boundaries have never been found in the Earth's mantle before, and they challenge scientists' understanding of the interior. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The issue of control over the .za domain space may be hogging the limelight, but the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill which triggered the dispute contains other provisions more worrying to many IT experts.

Somali Telecom's Ed Resor has an interesting story to tell. He helped the Eritreans get international connectivity at the end of the war with Ethiopia and created similar telecomms links for Somalia. He's also recently invested in the Congo (DRC). It sounds like he always invests in former war zones but he assured us in this interview in New York that he's looking for places where people think it can't be done because they are either too small or too difficult.

Tunisia's recent crackdown on cyber-dissidents has taken an ominous turn with the arrest and detention of journalist Zouhair Yahyaoui, founder and editor of the online news site TUNeZINE.

Apartheid victims are to take legal steps against justice minister Penuell Maduna in a last-ditch effort to get access to the state's draft reparations policy. Shirley Gunn, chairperson of the Khulumani Victims Support Group's Western Cape branch said the action was decided on after several attempts to see the draft legislation, and to become involved in discussions on reparations, failed.

Kabissa is proud have been one of four winners of the ICT Stories Competition, organised by infoDev and IICD to promote stories and experiences of using ICTs for development. For those of you who might be in the Washington DC area on Thursday, June 20th, we would like to invite you to come to a presentation of our winning story. The event will take place at infoDev (follow link for details). If you decide to attend, be sure to RSVP to Pamela Street ([email protected]) so she can organise a visitor pass for you. You can read the fulltext of our winning story here:

Gun Free South Africa is committed to making a material contribution to building a safe and secure nation, free from fear, by reducing the number of firearms in society. It is looking for an information, communication and research officer.

Andrew Meldrum, a foreign correspondent for the British paper, The Guardian, went on trial in Harare this week accused of publishing a false story in a test case for the state's restrictive media laws. Meldrum, 50, is US citizen and Zimbabwean permanent resident who has lived in the country since 1980. He pleaded not guilty.

Adult mortality is increasing in many parts of Africa. Is this due to AIDS? Can existing data answer this question? What other statistics are needed to document the spread of the AIDS epidemic in Africa? Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine examines the impact of HIV/AIDS on adult mortality in five African countries. It shows that increases in adult mortality correspond to high levels of HIV infection. However, there is a pressing need to collect more data on adult mortality in Africa, and to exploit more fully existing data sources.

This article about providing a low-cost solution to getting connected may inspire others who are in a similar situation. Enjoy.

Last week, a little-known committee quietly released a report calling for major changes in the governing of the organization that manages the Internet.

As a key outcome of the Africa Regional Conference on the World Summ it on the Information Society (WSIS) held recently in Bamako, Mali, an African Regional Bureau has been established to work with the WSIS secretariat.

A direct telephone line was reinstalled on Wednesday between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and neighbouring Republic of Congo (ROC) after a 15-year hiatus, the director of the National Telecommunications and Post Office, Rene-Serge Blanchard Oba, said in the ROC capital, Brazzaville.

The Minister of Information and Publicity, Professor Jonathan Moyo, seems to have kept his word that the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act will put to silence what he termed “gutter and trash journalism”. The Act has indeed been invoked over 12 (twelve) times to date, however not against gutter and trash journalism, but on the contrary, to silence the Zimbabwe private media from performing its constitutionally guaranteed duty of informing the public. The Act hovers over the operations of each man and women working in the private media in Zimbabwe, as literally anything written or published can be “criminal”. The coming of the Act has seen the arrests of journalists at a frequency that has never been experienced in independent Zimbabwe. And the arrests are for virtually anything one’s mind can fathom.