Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, including the two vice presidents and relatives of President Robert Mugabe, has taken over most of the top commercial farms under the government’s fast-track land reforms, it was established this week.A list compiled from the government’s own advertisements in the state media and reports from commercial farmers shows that among those who have benefited from the model A2 scheme meant to create the new commercial farmer are Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, army commander Constantine Chiwenga, director of prisons Paradzayi Zimondi and even broadcaster Reuben Barwe.

The managing director of Zimbabwe's "private" television station, Joy TV, Tony De Villiers has quit the station allegedly because of the interference of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC). Joy TV is leasing a station from ZBC and uses ZBC's signal transmitters. The Daily News reported on 14 May 2002. Tony De Villiers indicated in his resignation letter that recent events have forced him to resign. "With regard to the announcement and the events associated thereto, it is with deep regret that I hereby tender my resignation as a director of Flame Lily Broadcasting limited (Joy TV)," read De Villiers letter.

In his first major policy address on expectations for the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held this August, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity as five key areas where concrete results can and must be obtained. By concentrating on these five areas, the Secretary-General said, in a speech delivered by his wife Nane Annan at the American Museum of Natural History, the Summit could produce an ambitious but achievable programme of practical steps to improve the lives of all human beings while protecting the global environment.

A Survey of Civil Society Organisations Worldwide by Civicus.

Libya and Sudan, two of the seven countries on a US list of designated "state sponsors of terrorism," came closest to meeting Washington’s demands for co-operation after the 11 September attacks on the United States, the State Department said in a report released this week. The annual report "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001" - bigger than ever at 179 pages - says 2001 was the deadliest year for terrorist attacks because of the 3,000 people killed by suicide hijackers in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Pleas by the Eastern Cape Hark project for donations did not fall on deaf ears and it received a boost of R15 000 for its community outreach programmes. The project has been funded by Standard Bank and offers hearing screening, diagnostic testing, hearing aid fitting, evaluations, counselling, school placement and parent training for care givers of hearing impaired children.

Pleas by the Eastern Cape Hark project for donations did not fall on deaf ears and it received a boost of R15 000 for its community outreach programmes. The project has been funded by Standard Bank and offers hearing screening, diagnostic testing, hearing aid fitting, evaluations, counselling, school placement and parent training for care givers of hearing impaired children.

The world's richest countries failed last year to meet their commitments to reducing poverty, a new report says. The report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that represents the 29 most industrialised countries reveals a 2.3 billion dollar drop in aid from member countries last year from the year 2000.

Several developing nations on Wednesday said that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria should be altered to give African nations and other countries with high HIV infection rates "more of a say" in the fund's operations, Reuters reports. Speaking to the World Health Assembly -- the governing body of the World Health Organization -- a representative from Botswana said, "We recommend that Africa's representation on the board ... be reviewed to make sure that it is in proportion to the burden of the disease."

The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $50 million over five years to a $70 million United Nations initiative to improve the lives of poor children worldwide by fortifying basic foods with vitamin supplements.

International conventions have not stopped multi-national corporations from trying to secure valuable contracts by bribing government officials in the world's emerging economies - especially in the arms and defence, and public works and construction industries. ''Fine words are not enough. Until people are brought before the courts, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Convention (OECD) convention on bribery will not make a difference to the developing world, where money is siphoned off from schools and hospitals and essential public works projects,'' said Transparency International Kenya Director, John Githongo.

Last week, by an odd twist of my schedule, I found myself visiting two sites in two hemispheres that each focus on apartheid. One is well known: Robben Island, the prison off Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 18 years. The other is hardly visible: Maticni Street in Usti nad Labem, a gritty industrial town in the Czech Republic, where locals built a block-long wall in 1999 to separate an enclave of the Roma (gypsies) from the Czechs across the street. Robben Island, a seminal training ground for anti-apartheid forces, was a maximum-security facility from which no political prisoner ever escaped. The wall at Usti, a seven-foot-high noise barrier with several open gates through it, prevented nobody from moving anywhere. Robben Island endured for decades. The so-called "wall of shame" lasted about a month. Some say the story out of Usti -- near the border with the former East Germany, and only a decade distant from the Berlin Wall -- loomed larger in the press than it deserved to. But did it? Apartheid comes in many forms. But it always starts from a premise that "they're different from us," and that they need to be separated from us, often forcibly.

The UN Special Session for Children has evoked high hopes from organisations working for the benefit of children. Many organisations, advocacy groups and NGOs list out their expectations from the session.

Olara Otunnu, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, said yesterday that when the International Criminal Court was established he would work to ensure that people responsible for recruiting child soldiers were among the first to be indicted.

HIV/AIDS could "destroy the global economy" and threatens to disrupt international efforts to combat terrorism, U.N. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette told delegates on Monday at a meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in Denver, the Denver Post reports.

A consortium of key humanitarian agencies has adopted a policy statement designed to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation in humanitarian crises throughout the world. In the statement members of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) pledged to ensure that their staff and implementing partners do not abuse their power and influence to exploit and harm victims of conflict, particularly women and children.

The board in New York City met to discuss a wide range of issues including; i) First round of proposals and their management, ii) The overall strategy and mission of the fund, iii) The appointment of the Fund's first Executive Director and the Trustee Agreement that the Fund is undertaking with the World Bank to manage the Fund's financial resources; iv) Monitoring and evaluation tools for tracking proposals in countries; v) Procurement; vi) Partnership strategies for different organizations and entities including international agencies, local governments, NGOs and national ministries of health, companies and foundations; vii) WHO/Administrative Services. The Board also reviewed documents pertaining to many issues, including the ones listed below. In many cases, these issues were tabled but discussion deferred to the next Board meeting. This report summarizes some of the key points and issues raised by these documents so that the NGO community and other civil society groups can have insight and contributions into the decisions that will be taken at the next Board meeting.

In the last five years, the term globalization has been debated at almost every world forum and is said to be the best way to address extreme poverty in developing countries like Zambia. The international community led by the United Nations has been working with other donors to try and meet the so called development targets which is a vision and strategy to reduce the current world's poverty levels by 50% by the year 2015.That is reducing the number of people living in poverty in Zambia from the current 8 million to about 4 million before 2015.

Chocolate manufacturers, human rights groups and the Ivory Coast Government have signed pact aimed at ending the abuse of child labour in the chocolate industry. The agreement aims to address the use of children in West Africa's cocoa fields, and measures designed to crack down on mistreatment are set to be in place before the harvest season in autumn.

In order to save some of the services provided by natural ecosystems, such as carbon sequestration supplied by rapidly disappearing forests and other human-driven ecosystem changes, we have to start paying for them. So argue Gretchen Daily, a conservation biologist at Stanford University, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Ellison.