Starting October 27, DOT-COM and InterAction are hosting a month long discussion examining the practical approaches to bringing ICT connectivity to poor, rural and other un and under-served communities.

Chad has begun to export oil to the United States, but this desperately poor African country remains incapable of producing electricity to meet its own power needs. Just two percent of the landlocked country's eight million people have access to the electricity produced irregularly by an ancient rundown power station in the capital, N'Djamena.

Public Citizen's Water for All Campaign now has a 25 minute audio visual presentation on everything you ever wanted to know about water privatisation. The movie exposes the major multinational water companies investing in water resources and analyses the environmental and social impacts of water privatisation, water mining and bulk water sales. It is a great educational tool for community groups, schools, libraries and anyone else who is concerned about protecting the earth's water and ensuring that clean and affordable water is available to all.

Public Citizen's Water for All Campaign now has a 25 minute audio visual presentation on everything you ever wanted to know about water privatization. The movie exposes the major multinational water companies investing in water resources and analyzes the environmental and social impacts of water privatization, water mining and bulk water sales. It is a great educational tool for community groups, schools, libraries and anyone else who is concerned about protecting the earth's water and ensuring that clean and affordable water is available to all.

The logic of capitalism that is killing the planet continues with its growth imperative, gobbling up common sense. It enables corporations to swallow the ecological crisis and regurgitate it as a PR opportunity, and as another source of profits at the expense of communities and the Earth. And thinly veiled exploits and crocodile tears from Shell, Citi, Monsanto et. al. will not save the Planet, argues Doyle Canning, the Organising Director at the Institute for Social Ecology Biotechnology Project, in a commentary for www.zmag.org

Environmental activist group Earthlife Africa has accused the department of minerals and energy of having a public participation process designed to "delay and distort" public engagement around the country's radioactive waste policy.

Environmental activist group Earthlife Africa has accused the department of minerals and energy of having a public participation process designed to "delay and distort" public engagement around the country's radioactive waste policy.

Three years ago a deal between the authorities of Gabon and a French logging company traded away 10,352 hectares of the Lope Reserve in return for 5,200 hectares of a previously not protected area of remote upland primary forests being added to the reserve. The highly controversial deal was arranged by officials of the US-based organization Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In 2001, the stage moved to Congo Brazzaville. Wildlife Conservation Society announced a deal involving the Goualogo triangle, bordering the Nouabale Ndoki Park.

The European Union is failing to stop European fishers from plundering the waters of poor developing states, a leading green group said last Thursday. E.U. fisheries ministers are reviewing the cash-for-fishing deals signed with mostly African coastal states. Such agreements are vital for the E.U. fishing industry as fish stocks collapse in European waters.

Bill Gates donation of U.S. $25 million for biofortification - breeding crops with higher levels of micronutrients - is an effort to provide a life-saving shot to the dying family of public-sector international agricultural research institutes. But Gates, argues Devinder Sharma, a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst, has to understand that biotechnology, the way it is being promoted by corporate interests, has the potential to further the great divide between haves and have-nots. Biotechnology will, in reality, push more people in the hunger trap.

The Sh6 billion-a-year fish industry is under threat from declining fish species in Lake Victoria, experts warn. Experts said there was a marked decline in fisheries resources in Africa's largest fresh water lake, posing a serious threat to the lucrative industry that employs upwards of 150,000 people.

A conference earlier this year on water privatisation in Ghana detailed how the efforts of the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC) and later the Ghana National Coalition Against the Privatisation of Water, with the help of international civil society, successfully brought into the public domain the "hitherto secret, corporate-driven, World Bank-pressurised, fast-tracked, Ghana government water privatisation agenda." The conference deliberations commenced with opening remarks from Charles Abugre, Executive Director of ISODEC, who said the imposition of privatisation and the oppressive conditionalities of international finance capital continued to weigh heavily on developing countries, but that the small victories against water privatisation in Ghana and elsewhere were encouraging, and may be the forerunners to complete victory.

The public prosecutor's office in Paris said this week it was opening a formal judicial inquiry into alleged corruption by a French engineering firm and the American oil services giant Halliburton, which was headed until two years ago by Dick Cheney, the vice-president of the United States. The financial crimes squad in Paris believes a French oil and gas engineering firm, Technip, and particularly the Halliburton subsidiary KBR were jointly involved during the 1990s in the payment of up to $200m (£120m) of under-the-counter "commissions" in relation to a huge gas contract in Nigeria.

The Namibia Development Trust is to start work on the delimitation of two conservancies in the Karas Region this week. Conservancies are aimed at allowing communities in communal areas to preserve and benefit from the fauna and flora in their areas.

“The taps are dry, only my eyes run,” said a school-boy from Nairobi, a water-starved country. The deadly dip in water resources - on an average 4 out of 10 people in the world live in water-starved areas - has become a grave concern. It is predicted that by 2025, 5.5 billion of the world population will be pushed to the severely water-starved areas.

South Africa said Monday it had smashed a cross-border gang of rhino poachers in a joint operation with neighbouring Mozambique, but the incidents have raised concerns about security in a planned transfrontier park. The first incident occurred in early September, when a heavily pregnant female rhino was found shot dead with her horn removed in South Africa's famed Kruger National Park, the country's Environment Ministry said in a statement.

Beatrice Mtetwa, one of Zimbabwe's top human rights lawyers, said on Friday that she had pressed assault charges against a police officer who arrested her this week after she had undergone an attempted hijacking and was repeatedly punched, kicked and strangled for over three hours.

The number of people seeking refuge as a result of environmental disaster is set to increase dramatically over the coming years. Ironically, given current attitudes, industrialised countries will resist accommodating them, and yet they will have become refugees as a direct result of the way the west lives. Global warming - more than war or political upheaval - stands to displace millions. And climate change is being driven by fossil fuel-intensive lifestyles. Though they have no official status, environmental refugees are already with us.

Institutional reform must allow the rural poor to increase their control over and access to natural resource wealth and environmental assets in the areas in which they live, says a paper from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Global Network and World Wildlife Fund that looks at the current treatment of rural poverty and the environment and highlights why an enduring integration of poverty and the environment has proven difficult in practice.

One of the most celebrated achievements of South Africa’s transition to democracy is the Bill of Rights, enshrined in the Constitution, which states that, "everyone has the right to have access to sufficient water." The privatization of water violates that constitutional and human right in every way imaginable. At all levels of life - political, social, economic and cultural - the privatization of water is anti-democratic, anti-social and anti-human. In response to privatization South African activists have created a national coalition against water privatization.