Sanusha Naidu compiles a list of the top stories on Sino-African relations.

Chinadialogue.net, the bilingual Chinese-English website on environment and climate, is delighted to welcome Linden Ellis as United States project director. Linden Ellis will be based in San Francisco and will guide China Dialogue’s future US operations and development. Linden Ellis will be building on the achievements of Kate Cheney-Davidson, China Dialogue’s first US editor.

GRAIN has launched a new website that offers the most comprehensive information tool on the global land grab for outsourced food production:
This new site is an improved version of the site initiated by GRAIN last year, which provides an open, up-to-date and easy to search library of over 800 articles, interviews and reports on farm land grabs around the world published since the outbreak of the food crisis in 2008.

En route to the twin summits at the end of the year— the food crisis summit in Rome in November, and the climate crisis summit to be held in Copenhagen in December— the meeting of the FAO Seed Treaty (ITPGRFA) is at the critical nexus of the international community’s ability to respond to the food and climate crises.

The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF) provides fellowships for established scholars whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. These fellowships permit professors, researchers and other senior academics to find temporary refuge at universities and colleges anywhere in the world, enabling them to pursue their academic work and to continue to share their knowledge with students, colleagues, and the community at large.

In a particularly infuriating Article, the NewYorkTimes sites developing countries as the toughest places to monetize web traffic for web services like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. The article makes the argument that countries in South America, parts of Asia and Africa, are particularly hard to monetize due to the increased costs of serving rich media (like video and flash advertisements) to low bandwidth regions of the world.

An effort to fight global poverty and hunger may become a Trojan horse to force genetically engineered crops on countries and farmers that do not want them. In the Senate, Senators Bob Casey (D-Penn.) and Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) introduced the Global Food Security Act, which increases funding for agricultural research in the developing world, and a companion bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be introduced soon.

By 2011, the International Labour Organisation will adopt an international standard listing the rights of domestic workers. Domestic/household workers want the right to be treated properly as workers. An ILO Convention would be an important step forward.

From 15 to 18 June 2009, Niger will host the 3rd edition of the Grand Diplomatic North-South Conferences (GDNSC) initiated by ACECI (www.aceci.org). This 3rd GDNSC having as theme "Translate the MDGs into a poverty reduction law ", is co-organised by the National Assembly of Niger, the Consortium composed of civil society organisations and networks, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in cooperation with Niger’s technical and financial partners.

cc As climate change forces economies around the world to cap carbon emissions, investors are pouring cash into the development of biofuels, as a replacement for fossil fuels. Seif Madoffe writes that this has led to ‘climate colonialism’ – ‘a massive land-grabbing scramble in Africa’, as European companies – some with foreign aid money support – rapidly establish enormous carbon monoculture fields in tropical countries. With reference to the Saadani National Park in Tanzania, Madoffe asks whether it is ethical for rich countries in the North to make ‘renewable’ carbon in places where it has serious negative impacts on poor people and tropical forests that will be cut down to create space for ‘carbon fields’ in monoculture plantations.

OI are looking for a consultant to work a total of 30 days over a three – four month period to undertake project work relevant to the OI digital presence. We are preferably looking for someone who can work two days per week. The successful candidate will need to be a highly experienced digital communications professional who is able to come into the post and take over on both digital campaigns work and web managerial tasks with confidence. We particularly need support from a web specialist to help us move forward on some areas of site development.

Sanusha Naidu compiles a list of the top stories on Sino-African relations.

Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative would be will be organising a side event in collaboration with Eastern Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders project and African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF) at United Nations Office in Geneva (UNOG) on Extrajudicial Killings in Kenya and Police Reforms in East Africa on the same the day the UN Special rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings Philip Alston is to present a report on Kenya on 3 June 2009 from 2:00 -4:00 PM in room number 25.

The war against HIV/AIDS, which has too often been fought in plush offices and conference centres, needs to be reclaimed by people in developing countries, who are most affected, or it will continue to be a losing battle. This was the message from the Global Citizens Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, organized by international anti-poverty agency ActionAid, and attended by a broad range of organisations in the field of HIV and AIDS to discuss using social mobilization to "repackage" the HIV response.

In September 2008 I was in New York to attend the UN high-level meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the internationally agreed targets to reduce poverty by 2015. Delegate after delegate talked about the need for more funds to eradicate hunger, to cut preventable deaths of infants and pregnant women, to provide clean water and sanitation, to educate girls. The life and dignity of billions of people were at stake, but there was only limited will to back up the talk with money.

Norway said on Monday it was renewing aid to Zimbabwe it cut off in 2000, despite worries about what it called "years of misrule, embezzlement and hyperinflation" under President Robert Mugabe. The Norwegian government, one of the first to renew badly needed aid, said it would give 58 million crowns (5.8 million pounds) via non-governmental organizations, the World Bank and United Nations, avoiding the government financial system.

An expert group meeting on the role of the private sector and civil society organizations in the implementation of NEPAD programmes and projects is underway in Addis Ababa to identify challenges hindering the process. Opening the meeting the Head of the NEPAD Support Section at the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Mr. Emmanuel Nnadozie challenged the team to clearly "articulate policy measures to accelerate their involvement in NEPAD implementation at regional, sub regional and national levels".

In an interview with Mahmood Mamdani, questions the author about his views on the Darfur conflict and his latest book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. Contending that children and teenagers in the US mobilised under the Save Darfur campaign should be considered as 'child soldiers' supporting a military effort, Mamdani argues that what essentially represents a form of political mobilisation for war has been effectively promoted as a moral crusade. Mamdani will be speaking at an event organised by Pambazuka News in Oxford, UK, on

The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) – formerly the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality - is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation that works towards achieving full legal and social freedom, dignity and equality for lesbian, transgender, gay and bisexual (LGBT) people in South Africa. As part of implementing the strategic plan, the LGEP is now seeking to employ a Senior Programmes Officer.

Aid agencies are far more accountable to disaster affected people than they were a decade ago, says the latest Humanitarian Accountability Report, but problems remain in transparency about interventions, communication with aid recipients, monitoring and reporting on sexual abuse and eliminating corruption