Angola will name Treasury and Finance Ministry officials involved in the illegal transfer of government funds abroad after concluding investigations in 45 days, a prosecutor has said.

On November 5, 2009, Christian Aid partners OMUNGA and SOS Habitat were awarded the Civil Society Human Rights National Award, organized by the Human Rights Coordination Committee and Open Society Foundation –Angola. The award was implemented for the first time this year and is granted to organisations and individuals that have contributed to the defence, respect, protection and guarantee of human rights in Angola. This is a fantastic recognition of our partner’s human rights work in the country.

The convictions of Pierre Falcone, Arcadi Gaydamak, ex-president's son Jean-Christophe Mitterrand and Charles Pasqua in a French court for arms trafficking to Angola have exposed the impunity with which arms traffickers supplied weapons to Angola during its 27-year civil war.

Arkadi Gaydamak, a Russian-born Israeli businessman and Pierre Falcone, his French associate, have been sentenced to six-year jail terms for organising the illegal trafficking of weapons to Angola.

More than 30,000 Angolans are stranded in transit camps after being abruptly deported from the Democratic Republic of Congo and there are growing fears of a cholera outbreak as the rainy season begins.?? The families - around two thirds of whom had official refugee status in DRC - were booted out earlier this month in retaliation for Angola expelling thousands of Congolese migrants in recent years.

The tit-for-tat expulsion of thousands of Angolan refugees living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the repatriation of thousands of undocumented Congolese migrants working in Angola, is raising fears of a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the making. According to ANGOP, the Angolan state-run media outlet, the number of Angolans forcefully removed from the DRC since a large-scale repatriation operation kicked off in August 2009 had topped 23,000 by 13 October.

Angelina Silva doesn’t remember the exact dates when her sons died. She just remembers their ages. "One was one year old, the other was one year and nine months," she said. "They had an illness. We think it was malaria, but we don’t know for sure." The 30-year-old, who has five other children and lives in a shantytown on the outskirts of Angola’s capital Luanda, is unsentimental.

Angolans are tired of waiting for presidential elections and may soon take to the streets in protest against delays, the head of the main opposition UNITA party has said. Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, in power for 30 years, has pushed back a presidential poll at least three times since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002.

Fernando Pacheco

A private oil company in Angola, given permission by the state oil company Sonangol to bid for potentially lucrative oil rights, has shareholders with the same names as Sonangol's chairman and other top officials, Global Witness has learned. Angola is one of the two top oil-producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa but most of its people still live in dire poverty.

In the last four days approximately three thousand houses have been demolished and the same estimated number of Angolan families has been forcibly evicted in the (commonly called) Bagdad neighbourhood, in the Sector 5 of M’Bonde Chapéu, in the Kilamba Kiaxi municipality of Luanda.

Angola will invest an estimated $1.2 billion in agricultural development over the next four years as part of a food security initiative, according to a government statement. The investment will be financed by a line of credit from the China Development Bank, private investment and other loans, said the statement in the state-owned newspaper Jornal de Angola.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the country’s largest refiner, and CNOOC Ltd. agreed to buy a 20 percent stake in Angola’s offshore deepwater Block 32 for $1.3 billion from Marathon Oil Corp. Marathon, the fourth-largest U.S. oil company, will keep a 10 percent interest in the block, site of 12 announced petroleum discoveries, after the sale, which is expected to close by year- end, the companies said today in separate statements.

Angola's move to hold its elections this year are doubtful following the absence of a Constitution. Media reports in the rich oil nation said the country's body in charge of drafting a new constitution said preparations of the document would take longer than expected.

The human rights body has urged the Angolan government to halt unlawful detention and torture of people suspected of rebel activities in oil-producing province of Cabinda. According to the 27 paged report released by Human Rights Watch today, Angolan armed forces and state intelligence officials have arbitrarily arrested 38 people belonging to the Liberation Front of the Enclave of Cabinda accused of state security crimes in Cabinda between September 2007 and March 2009.

The Angolan government should immediately end the unlawful detention and torture of people suspected of rebel activities in the oil-rich enclave province of Cabinda, Human Rights Watch said. In the 27-page report, "‘They Put Me in the Hole': Military Detention, Torture, and Lack of Due Process in Cabinda," Human Rights Watch shows a disturbing pattern of human rights violations by the Angolan armed forces and state intelligence officials.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the foreign travel ban that has been placed on William Tonet, the editor of the independent Luanda-based biweekly Folha 8 (F8), whose passport was seized when he tried to cross by land into Namibia on 9 May. Tonet has been harassed by the authorities ever since the newspaper’s creation in 1995.

Teresa Barros’ problems started last year with the death of her baby. "Our youngest daughter died," Barros (38) explained. "My husband blames me, and now he drinks a lot and picks fights and makes confusion." "My family won’t do anything. They said my other children need their father, and I must stay with him. But it’s desperate, I can’t go on like this," she added.

The Angola government is considering over US8.6 billion investment to boost the transformation of the industry between 2009 and 2012, Angola's deputy-minister for industry Kiala Gabriel has announced. Mr Abriel said the amount will be channeled to various sub-programmes like those of reconstitution of the human capital and creation of infrastructures to support the development.

Angolan refugees in Zambia’s Western Province have resisted voluntary repatriation despite their country's political stability and the on-going national economic reconstruction, the UN refugees agency report has revealed. According to the voluntary repatriation intention survey conducted by United Nations High Commission for Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Zambian government at Mayukwayukwa Refugee Settlement, results showed that only 251 had expressed interest to repatriate out of the 10,000 in the camps.