Pretoria-based Professor Wouter van Hoven, who is undertaking the world's largest elephant restocking programme in Angola, is perhaps best known as a modern-day Noah. His Operation Noah's Ark will culminate in June 2003 when 150 elephants are captured in Botswana and South Africa. They will be transported by road to Walvis Bay and, with 150 other mammals from 12 species, will be loaded on to a South African Navy ship and taken by road to the Kissama National Park, 75km south of Luanda.

The European Commission (EC) is to provide Angola with US $117 million to support the country's peace process following the signing in April of a ceasefire between the government and UNITA rebels.

Angolan aid groups say a French-Swiss investigation into alleged illegal arms dealing, corruption and money laundering by top French and Angolan figures has hurt famine relief efforts. "Many international organizations have refused to send aid because they think Angola's rulers are too rich," Tunga Alberto, head of the Angolan Federation of Non-governmental Organizations, told The Associated Press.

A handful of NGOs are trying to stop AIDS in Angola before it reaches catastrophic proportions. All the ingredients for a crisis exist in the country: four million people are displaced, there are lots of soldiers with weapons and no control, appalling poverty, high unemployment, low education, crowded shantytowns and lots of young women with no jobs, no education and no possibility of earning an income except through sex.

BP's accounts will in future be scrutinised with more care than usual because they could alter the fortunes of a country. Last year, BP announced it would publish annually the amount it paid to the Angolan government for oil it extracted from Angolan waters. This seemingly innocuous statement produced an extraordinary response from Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company, which sent BP a letter full of veiled threats about what might happen if it published the information. What, one might ask, do they have to hide? Well, last year, one third of Angola's state income - $1bn -appears to have gone missing. Some 87% of state income is from oil. No one knows where the money has gone because of the government's and Sonangol's secretiveness.

Switzerland denied on Monday it had leaked information to a French newspaper about the alleged involvement of Angola's president in a $614-million embezzlement of his government's loan repayment to Russia. The allegations recently published in Le Monde sparked a diplomatic row between Angola and Switzerland. On Sunday, the Angolan president's office issued a statement accusing the Swiss government of leaking the information to the newspaper, which it called an "unfriendly act."

Just back from Angola, Soraya Keshavjee, a professional counsellor, reviews the situation in the country. She calls on the international community to revisit the situation in Angola because of the women of the country.

As the US Congress continues its investigation of the Enron affair, human rights advocates are calling for a probe of the Bush administration's possible role in another energy and influence-peddling scandal. According to a recent report by the British-based non-governmental organization Global Witness, Bush and US oil interests have ties to some of the key figures in the arms-for-oil scandal which has devastated Angola.

As the weeks have passed since Angola’s ceasefire was signed between Unita and the MPLA government on April 4, it has become clear that a grim situation lies behind Unita lines. As people stumble out of the bush into reception centers, they are telling of intense suffering, of people dying of hunger. Olara Otunnu, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict has been traveling in Angola during the past week, visiting the eastern and central provinces of Bie, Moxico and Benguela. He talked to allAfrica.com by telephone from the Angolan capital, Luanda, about what he’d encountered.

Post-war Angola must invest heavily in its children if it wants to consolidate and preserve its new-found peace, a senior UN official said in Luanda.

Malnutrition levels in at least seven newly accessible areas in Angola are "critical", according to the United Nations. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday that inter-agency rapid assessments in 28 areas which were cut off from relief aid before May because of the war indicated that people needed assistance urgently.

Angola is one of the worst places in the world to be a child. One child in three dies before the age of five and only 30 percent of those who survive ever make it to school, a new rights monitoring group said on Wednesday.

Angola's peace process has entered a critical phase. While the government anounced on Thursday with some satisfaction that close to 42,000 UNITA troops had been quartered - corresponding to about 78 percent of the former rebel group's military force - the international community warned that all was not well. Humanitarian Coordinator and UNDP Representative in Angola, Eric de Mul, told IRIN in an interview that although there was real concern over conditions in the quartering areas, the government was yet to meet with the international community to draw up a plan that would enable them to provide assistance.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has started distributing food aid to thousands of severely malnourished people who are being discovered in areas of Angola now open to aid workers after last month's peace agreement.

The international medical relief organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has started an emergency feeding and medical programme in Chipindo, in Angola's southern province of Huila, to aid 18,000 isolated people in severe need.

The National Union for Plastic Artists (UNAP) is planning to train Angolan journalists on arts and culture enabling them to make a better coverage of the local arts’ movement. A 3-months training is aimed at providing tools to specialized journalists both from the public and the private media, particularly those who are members of the Association of Cultural Journalists(AJC). “We are conscious that journalists may do a better job if given new and right tools on arts and culture”, said Antonio Tomas "Tona", Unap’s general secretary. “The unsuccessful coverage by the journalists on arts is perfectly understandable as throughout the years the headlines were about war”, he added. Tona believes that journalists need to learn some basic arts’ concepts. The Union will count on its own trainers to set up a special program for journalists in the coming days. It is not yet clear when the training will start.

The international medical relief organisation
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has started an emergency feeding and medical
programme in Chipindo, in Angola's southern province of Huila, to aid 18,000 isolated people in severe need. During an exploratory medical mission the MSF team discovered mortality
figures as high as 6.1 per 10,000 people a day for children under 5 and 4.5
deaths per 10,000 a day for the population in general. These figures are well above the emergency threshold of 1 death for 10,000 a day.

MSF has finally gained access to the "grey areas" in Angola where, for years, people have been living without any international aid. Malnutrition is far above emergency thresholds with 30% of the children examined in a state of severe malnutrition.

Perhaps the most visible sign that peace has come to Angola are the trucks that have again begun winding between the country's far-flung towns and cities, along roads rarely passable during 27 years of civil war. As Angola begins the slow process of rebuilding, one crucial test of the new peace will be whether the government is able to control these remote spaces, home to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the rebel group that has been fighting for control of Angola since 1975. The price of failure, diplomats, and analysts say, is that Angola could become a "failed state," like Somalia, where trucks can no longer pass, and the rule of law exists only in theory.

The need for land reform is among the new hurdles facing Angola as the country moves to a post-conflict phase of reconstruction and development in the wake of this month's ceasefire agreement.