Militants in southern Nigeria have freed 43 oil
workers after holding them hostage for four days on an offshore oil rig,
ChevronTexaco, the US transnational for which the hostages worked, said on
Friday. "The youths left the rig on Wednesday night and the hostages were freed
unharmed," a senior company official told IRIN.

Since the oil boom that started in 1997, Equatorial Guinea has not only been a target of pressure to improve its disastrous human rights situation, it has also been able to spend its new riches on pressuring other countries not to intervene in its affairs. Now an "African Switzerland," repression of the political opposition is stronger than ever but outside pressure remarkably low.

The need for land reform is among the new hurdles facing Angola as the country moves to a post-conflict phase of reconstruction and development in the wake of this month's ceasefire agreement.

"Bushmen are some of the best ecological scientists on the planet," Jon Young told a packed crowd at the Riekes Center in Silicon Valley. "We thought they were backwards because they're illiterate and don't dress like us. Now our scientists are asking them for information."

Tens of thousands of people in over 700 villages
in Kano State, northern Nigeria, may be infected by onchocerciasis (river
blindness), The Guardian newspaper reported the state governor, Rabiu Musa
Kwankwaso, as saying at the weekend.