In a major climb down, a Botswana newspaper was forced to concede that xenophobia against Zimbabweans was on the rise in Botswana after a fierce riot erupted in Gaborone during which five Zimbabwean buses were attacked by Batswana nationals. The newspaper conceded that relations between Batswana and Zimbabweans were at an all time low because of xenophobia. In an editorial, the paper said "the tendency for Batswana and Zimbabwean citizens to turn to violence against each other at the drop of a hat is now becoming commonplace."

The humanitarian situation of tens of thousands of Congolese who had been expelled from Angola into two southwestern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is stabilising as the number of new arrivals decreases, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported last Thursday. In a report detailing the situation of the expellees in the provinces of Bandundu and Kasai Occidental, OCHA said that the improvement in the humanitarian conditions could be attributed to a request made by the Congolese authorities to Angola to halt the expulsion of illegal migrants in its diamond mines until better conditions for their return could be arranged.

Angola's decades-long civil war is over, but the presence of landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) remain a major obstacle to recovery. The city of Luau in the eastern province of Moxico, once a bustling centre with 90,000 inhabitants, has been isolated since the war destroyed roads and the railroad. In a few weeks' time about 9,000 refugees will return to Luau from the DRC, increasing the population by a third. They will return to a place where land mines and UXOs are a daily threat.

For years, a discrepancy in global climate data has fuelled debate over global warming. Temperatures in the troposphere, the first 11 km of atmosphere, have been rising slower than models predict given the rate of increase in temperature on the Earth's surface. But polar orbiting satellites show that cooling in the stratosphere - the next layer of the atmosphere - explains the inconsistency, according to research published in Nature.

The Nigerian government should immediately conduct an independent investigation into the massacre of several hundred people in Yelwa on May 2, Human Rights Watch says. The federal and state authorities should also take concrete steps to prevent a further escalation of interethnic violence in Plateau State. "Unlike the findings of previous commissions of inquiry, the results of this investigation should be made public and acted upon," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa Division. Armed members of the predominantly Christian Tarok ethnic group on May 2 attacked the town of Yelwa, in the southern part of Plateau State, apparently in reprisal for earlier attacks against Taroks by members of the predominantly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.

Trade union rights are a misnomer in Rwanda according to a new International Confederation of Free Trade Unions report launched to coincide with the WTO review on Rwandan trade policy (10th and 12th May). The ICFTU report on the central African country shows shortcomings in the application of several core labour conventions which the government itself has ratified and calls upon the Rwandan authorities to comply with core labour standards. The report identifies several legal failings, particularly concerning the right to strike.

Some of the world's poorest people are suffering as a result of the war on terror, a leading UK charity has said. Christian Aid says the UK Government must reverse a "dangerous drift" towards linking aid to the fight against terror. A report cites Iraq, Afghanistan and Uganda as places where funds have been "wrongly diverted".

The UN has delivered an ultimatum to Eritrea after relations between the two sunk to a new low. The UN said Eritrea must cooperate with its peacekeeping force patrolling the border with Ethiopia, or else ask the UN to leave. The UN says its staff have been illegally detained, while Eritrea accuses the peacekeepers of serious crimes including paedophilia. Eritrea also claims the UN is destabilising the region.

Inter-party violence prevailed throughout the campaign period for the Zengeza by-election held from 27-28 March 2004, says a report from the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum. Seventy-five percent of the politically motivated assaults that were perpetrated in March 2004 occurred in Zengeza constituency during the campaign period. Incidents of assault have been indiscriminate with several reports of assaults of elderly persons over the age of 60. Three pregnant women were reportedly assaulted in March 2004.

Impoverished child refugees in Gambia are turning to prostitution with European visitors, compounding the West African country's sex-tourism problem, according to a U.N. children's fund report issued on Wednesday. Experts from UNICEF, which issued the report on sex abuse in Gambia, said they were concerned the country is increasingly a destination for sex tourists as countries in south-east Asia take steps to shake off their image as havens for paedophiles.

An impending global food crisis is threatening to destabilize national economies and create a "politics of food scarcity" in 2005, as grain stocks dwindle to their lowest level in 30 years due to neglected environmental factors that are crippling harvests, Earth Policy Institute President Lester Brown has said. The situation in 2004 is beginning to look a lot like 1974, but for different reasons, Brown said. Spreading deserts, falling water tables and crop-wilting temperatures are shrinking harvests in key producing countries, he said.

Sudan's government is guilty of "ethnic cleansing" and crimes against humanity, charges a new report released Friday by Human Rights Watch that accuses government-backed Arab militias of systematic attacks on black Sudanese peasants and government forces of starving black Sudanese to death in concentration camps. Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution to permit the safe return of more than one million people forced from their homes in the Darfur region of the country and to demand that Khartoum immediately disarm, disband, and withdraw the Arab militias with which government forces have carried out ethnic cleansing.

A team from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) arrived in a Chadian border town to verify reports of new refugees from Sudan's western region of Darfur arriving since the beginning of the month, the UNHCR said on Tuesday. Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva, said "local authorities estimate that each week some 200 to 300 people have been crossing the border from Darfur into Chad since the beginning of the month".

The government of the Republic of the Congo has closed all sites for internally displaced people (IDPs) of the Pool Department, the Ministry for Solidarity and Humanitarian Action said on Monday. In a communiqué, it said all seven sites were closed on Saturday. In January the government began to assist the voluntary return of thousands of IDPs in Kinkala, a town 50 km west of the capital, Brazzaville, to their home villages in the Pool. In April, IDPs were also taken from the districts of Mbanza-Ndounga, Ngoma Tse Tse and Kibossi back to the Pool.

Close to 25,000 people have been displaced in the eastern province of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since fighting began in April between the army and Rwandan Interahamwe militia, the UN Office for the Coordination of the Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Tuesday. This estimate was the result of a census system set up by an NGO, Caritas, with the support of local authorities and representatives of internally displaced persons (IDPs), OCHA reported.

The African Liberation Support Campaign Network (ALISC Network) and the Hackney Stop The War Coalition are jointly organising a Day School on Neocolonial Proxy Wars In Africa.

The notion that the truth will set you free has enduring appeal in developing countries which are newly free of repressive governments, and anxious to explore past abuses in an effort to avoid repeating them. Kenya is no exception to this trend. However, the country is also discovering that setting up a truth commission to probe human rights violations is less straight forward than it might appear. Although a commission has yet to open its doors in Kenya, fierce debate is already underway about the period of time that should be surveyed by the body.

Donor governments have failed to come forward with any money to help more than 600 000 women and children in Namibia survive the combined effects of erratic weather, severe poverty and a worsening Aids epidemic, UN aid agencies said on Tuesday. "We've received nothing. Not one cent," said Christiane Berthiaume, spokesperson for the World Food Programme. "This is one of the world's forgotten crises."

At least 120 demonstrators were killed by the security forces in Ivory Coast in March, according to a UN report. Several hundred others were said to be injured when the security forces opened fire on the demonstrators - 20 are still believed to be missing. "What happened on 25 and 26 March was the committing of massive human rights violations," the report said. The clashes put further strain on the peace deal between northern-based rebels and the government in the south.

Nigeria's top Muslim leader said on Wednesday that 300 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in Sunday's attacks by Christian militia in the town of Yelwa in the central Plateau state. Justice Abdulkadir Orire, secretary general of the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, described the killings in the remote farming town as "genocide" and said they took the death toll from three months of ethnic violence there to at least 700-800 people.