The peace agreement which ended years of war between north and south Sudan could unravel unless immediate steps are taken to salvage it, two key former diplomats say. "Today, five years after the historic Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed between North and South Sudan, there is a real threat of an all-out war returning to Sudan and still no permanent resolution to the Darfur conflict," Lt-Gen Lazarus Sumbeiwyo and John Danforth warned.

On September 19-25, 2010, a festival and conference promoting peace and conflict resolution will be held in Nairobi, Kenya. A two-day conference will be accompanied by seven days of artistic performances featuring traditional and popular music, oral narrative, and drama. Organized by the Drum Café, the event seeks to bring together practitioners and researchers working in areas related to the arts and/or conflict resolution in and out of Kenya.

Three flow stations in the oil-rich Niger Delta have had to be closed after a pipeline was sabotaged, according to Royal Dutch Shell. The company said the Jan. 30 leak on the Trans Ramos oil pipeline was due to sabotage, but no group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack. A represnetative of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta told a Nigerian newspaper at the end of January that it was ending a truce agreed in October 2009.

Fridah Awour Agolla has sold vegetables in Nairobi's Mathare slum for 20 years. In better times, her stock sold out every day. But lately market forces have begun to bite even harder for the millions in Kenya who live in such squalid, neglected settlements.

An article in The Lancet medical journal, co-authored by a UNHCR expert, says health care for people in conflict settings needs to be updated. It calls for changes in four key areas: delivery of health services; treatment of chronic diseases; development of health services in urban areas; and surveillance, measurement and monitoring.

Thanks to funding from the UN refugee agency, hundreds of primary schoolchildren in Sudan's volatile West Darfur state no longer have to study in the open. At the same time, UNHCR is helping to form bonds between different ethnic groups and avoid conflict in an area where hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced in recent years.

Millions in West Africa's arid Sahel belt could face famine this year unless the world acts quickly to help, the European Union's humanitarian aid arm has said. The warning came as Niger confirmed the veracity of a leaked government forecast that half its population will face food shortages this year after a dive in grain production, but said it had enough food stocks to care for the most needy.

The West is ignoring a jailed Ethiopian opposition leader to keep the Horn of Africa stable despite her being this week named on a United Nations list of arbitrary detainees, her party said on Friday. Birtukan Mideksa, leader of the Unity for Democracy and Justice party (UDJ), was first jailed with other opposition leaders when the 2005 election turned violent. She was pardoned in 2007 but re-arrested last year accused of violating that pardon.

Members of the Anglican Church are planning to hold a prayer meeting this Sunday in protest against ongoing persecution from an ousted bishop who is using the police to disrupt their services.

Djibouti has announced to send 450 troops to Somalia next month as to join the African Union peacekeepers mission in that country, the foreign ministry said.

Fighting between Islamist insurgents and African Union peacekeepers that started late on Thursday and continued into Friday killed at least 12 people in Somalia's capital, health services and witnesses said.

The evidence of five years of peace is everywhere in Juba, regional capital of Southern Sudan - in the brisk trade in the city's markets, its packed bars and nightclubs, and in the relaxed gait of the soldiers of the former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

France has asked the Central African authorities to shed light on the fate of the Central African ex-minister and rebel leader, Charles Massi, reported to be dead by his family of the torture he underwent in prison after having been handed over to Bangui.

From whichever angle you look at, it is simply wrong for a governing political party to own shares in a commercial company, let alone when such a company bids for government tenders, writes William Gumede.

Organisers of a protest march against the expulsion of Muslim cleric Sheikh Abdullah El Faisal say Kenyan police have arrested up to 400 people and are interrogating them to prove their nationality and try to uncover links to terrorism.

The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), a South African-based civil society organisation, is currently accepting applications for its Internship Programme. ACCORD works across Africa to bring creative African solutions to the challenges posed by conflict on the continent.

Nearly 80 percent of the 300,000 conflict-related deaths in Darfur were due to diseases like diarrhoea, not violence, Belgian scientists said on Friday. An analysis of deaths dating from 2003, when rebels took up arms against the government of Sudan, showed that after an initial peak of violent deaths in the still-ongoing conflict, diseases associated with diarrhoea became the major killers.

This workshop aims to provide an academic forum aimed at the discussion of immigration detention in liberal, democratic countries. This practice raises important questions for researchers from different fields of study: What implications does it have for understanding state power and the future governance of communities?

Amnesty International has called for much stricter controls for the military assistance being given to Somalia's transitional government. The human rights group says weapons are all too often being used against civilians or they end up in the hands of groups opposed to the government.

A Rwandan doctor wanted on charges of genocide and war crimes has been arrested in France, police say. Sosthene Munyemana, 45, who had been working in a hospital in Bordeaux for eight years, denies the charges.