The International Trade Union Confederation is demanding that the Algerian authorities stop repression of the country’s emerging independent trade union movement. A wave of harassment of members of the National Independent Union of Public Administration Personnel (SNAPAP) has led to seven members of the union’s board, including four women, starting a hunger strike on 6 May. One of them, Fayza Abrakan, has been admitted to hospital in a serious condition.

Everlyne Wanjiku, a single mother of five, has earned a living selling vegetables in the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, for over three decades. And even though her earnings were meagre, she was able to provide all her children with a tertiary education. But now, like her many fellow poverty-stricken slum dwellers in this East African nation, she is feeling the pinch of the high cost of food and other commodities, which have skyrocketed globally.

Clinical trials are underway to test a new treatment for pregnant women, which could tackle some of the leading preventable causes of death for babies in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) said. A large number of pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with both malaria and sexually transmitted - reproductive tract infections (STIs - RTIs), according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Islamists who say they are being unfairly held in Moroccan prisons are staging hunger strikes to put more pressure on the new government to release them, according to campaigners who are in contact with the prisoners. Letters sent from jail by the inmates and shown to Reuters news agency by their supporters, describe a series of protests by prisoners, followed by punishments by their gaolers that include force feeding and torture.