Tanzanian media owner and prominent businessman Reginald Mengi and several of the journalists working in his media outlets have been slapped with a 100 billion shilling (approx. US$8.6 million) libel suit allegedly for defaming the executive chairperson of the Quality Group Limited, Yusuf Manji. The historic libel suit comes a few days after the 24th issue of the new English daily newspaper "This Day", owned by Mengi, exposed a property deal involving the Quality Group Company limited.

Tanzania is likely to take over the responsibility of prosecuting Rwandan genocide suspects whose trials under the current International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) will not be completed by the year 2008. "The Tribunal's leadership has asked the Tanzanian government to complete prosecuting genocide suspects after its mandate," said Dr. Mary Nagu, Tanzanian minister of Justice in a telephone interview with Hirondelle News. The United Nations Security Council had directed the Tribunal to complete trials in the coming two years and appeal cases by 2010.

More should be done to curb maternal deaths, which have continued to rise in Tanzania in the past decade despite efforts to reverse the trend, activists and officials have said. "It is a saddening reality, but still maternal deaths can be avoided," Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Tanzania's former president, told a rally held to commemorate women and girls who died due to childbirth and pregnancy complications. Citing Ministry of Health statistics, Mwinyi said maternal deaths increased from 529 out of every 100,000 birth in 1996 to 578 out of every 100,000 in 2005. "Such a level is very high and not acceptable," he said.

Three people have died and nine others admitted to hospital following a cholera outbreak on Tanzania's semiautonomous Island of Zanzibar, government officials said on Friday. The deaths occurred in Pemba Island, a sister island of the mainland of Unguja Island that forms Zanzibar. By Friday nine patients had been admitted to the cholera special centre, two in critical condition, Zanzibar's minister of health and social welfare, Sultan Mohamed Mugheiry, told a news conference in Stone Town, the Zanzibar capital.

Tanzanian villagers have begun using an energy-saving method to sterilise their drinking water - leaving the water under the sun. The piped water supply to Ndolela village in the central Iringa region is intermittent and even when it does it flow, it is not clean enough to drink. When the pipes run dry, villagers get water from a dirty spring. Mother of five Rose Longwa says the new process has changed her life. "We no longer suffer from stomach illness. That's because the water is clean and safe."

The battle against HIV/AIDS in Zanzibar will not succeed as long as trade in alcohol and commercial sex work continue to thrive on the island, according to Muslim leaders. "Zanzibar would have been free of HIV/AIDS if Muslims stuck to their religious teachings but, mainly, if the government was serious about controlling the spread of pubs, especially in residential areas," said Sheikh Azzan Khalid, deputy leader of the Zanzibar Islamic Propagation Group. "The state television has been a key player in moral decay by showing programmes which promote sex."

Tanzania's Williamson Diamonds Limited (WDL), will soon start providing antiretroviral therapy to employees, their families and people living in the surrounding villages. A medical officer-in-charge of the Mwadui Hospital, said the voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) centre at the hospital would offer antiretroviral therapy, now that it has secured clearance from the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS).

The workshop will be held July 10-11, 2006 in Iringa, Tanzania and TEDC 2006 seeks high quality submissions of original unpublished research on all aspects of technology for education in developing countries. Researchers and educators with new perspectives on applications of technology in this context are strongly encouraged to submit their work.

The Minister for Energy and Minerals, has said that Tanzania was committed to the implementation of the Zambia-Tanzania interconnector, which would enable the country to be connected to Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) Grid and benefit from its arrangement. In a speech read on his behalf by his Deputy, at the official opening of the SAPP meeting in Dar es Salaam, he said the current power shortage in the country has been due to the depletion of water in the main reservoirs of Mtera and Nyumba ya Mungu, adding that if Tanzania was an operating member country, it would have imported 120 MW through SAPP grid to fill in the power shortage.

The East African drought has caused food and power shortages in Tanzania and forced the government to implement measures to offset potentially serious humanitarian consequences. In an address to the nation on 28 February, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete said his administration was well prepared to cope with food and power shortages in the East African country. Still, Tanzanians are hoping that the seasonal long rains that have just begun will provide much needed relief.

With billions of dollars pouring in to fight Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tanzanian AIDS counsellor Gandencia Bazil has a simple request. "We need a bicycle," said Bazil, who heads the AIDS committee in this village near Lake Victoria, an area where an estimated 12 percent of people are infected with HIV. This predicament is repeated across Africa, where despite a huge jump in overseas assistance and government AIDS budgets, the cash earmarked to fight the epidemic is often not making it to the desperate people who need it most.

A hundred years after their ancestors went to war with Germany to resist colonial rule, Tanzanians are now contemplating seeking war reparations for the atrocities committed by the Germans during the Maji Maji war. The two-year war, which was fought between 1905 and 1907, started at Nandete in Kilwa district, Lindi region but soon spread to other southern areas of the country such as Songea in Ruvuma region. A total of 249,530 people died during the war, which affected the Ngoni, Matumbi, Waluguru, Makua, Yao and Makonde people.

Tanzania's power company on Thursday (February 23) invited bids for two gas-powered plants to boost electricity production following a drought that has reduced hydro power. East Africa's worst drought in years is threatening 11 million people with famine, and the power cuts are one of the first signs of what many say will be its widespread cost to the region's economy, as reported by Reuters.

The current power crisis hitting Tanzania can be resolved with the introduction of large-scale farming of plants known as Jetropha for producing bio-diesel to run thermal power stations. Professor Aggrey Nzali of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems of the new College of Engineering and Technology at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), explains the usage of plants in power generation.

Eliminating even modest fees for HIV testing can greatly increase the number of those tested in Tanzania and thereby enhance Aids-prevention efforts, US researchers have said. In a two-week pilot programme, the daily average of people tested for HIV at a clinic in Moshi jumped from four to 15 when the standard test fee of Tsh1,000 ($0.95) was waived, according to a study by Duke University Medical Centre.

Some 26 logging firms in East Africa say they stand to lose more than $ 4.6 million as well as their markets in Europe, Asia and America, following the Tanzania government's decision to ban exports of logs and sandalwood. It is estimated that the country loses between 130,000 hectares and 500,000 hectares of forest a year. Of that, 91,000 hectares are illegally felled. Human activities, population growth and poverty also reduce forest coverage by hundreds of thousands of hectares every year.

Tanzania is to receive more than $11 million from the US for a multifaceted anti-corruption programme. The grant is part of a US aid initiative intended to reward and encourage economic, social and governance reforms in developing countries. The two-year, $11.1 million package is being awarded to Tanzania in response to the country's own proposals for fighting corruption.

Britain will grant the Tanzanian government £310 million ($542.5 million) over the next three years for its poverty reduction programme. The grant will make Tanzania one of the biggest UK aid recipients in the world. Unlike in neighbouring East African countries, the money is direct government- to-government support and is meant to be spent on water, health and education projects. The new money follows an agreement between the Tanzanian government and donors on January 14 when the Partnership Framework Agreement was signed.

Tanzania has been forced to introduce daytime power cuts because a drought has severely reduced the amount of electricity being supplied to the national grid, the country's energy minister said on Thursday (February 2). The water level at the Mtera dam has fallen so low that hydroelectric power can no longer be generated there, the Minister for Energy and Natural Resources, Ibrahim Msabah, announced. Other power stations are producing well below capacity. "From this situation we have been obliged to start limited load sharing in the whole of the country for at least eight hours," Msabah said.

Donors and recipient governments are increasingly preferring General Budget Support to other forms of aid: development aid delivered directly into national budgets. This now accounts for 20 to 40 percent of government aid in many African countries. The results for development and poverty reduction have been mixed.