Bushmeat has become the most immediate threat to the future of wildlife populations in Africa, according to the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force. The task force, a consortium of conservation organizations and professionals, has just completed an international meeting to develop an action plan for countering this threat to wildlife.

At a conference in Stockholm to sign the international Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), officials from 120 countries and a host of environmental and civil society groups have gathered to celebrate the adoption of a treaty that will restrict a group of chemicals the United Nations has labelled the most dangerous in the world. The convention will enter into force once ratified by 50 countries.

European companies with their sights set on potentially huge profits from Sudan's rich oilfields are turning a blind eye to massive human rights abuses, says a new report calling for cross-border controls on big business.

Food security prospects have improved in arable districts and western pastoral areas of Kenya following favourable short and long rains, but food insecurity persists in pastoral districts in the east, according to the latest country report from USAID's Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). Food production trends would be uncertain in these pastoral areas after critically needed rains were low and poorly distributed, it said.

The United Nations Security Council has announced the reopening of the Congo River to commercial traffic, a vital thoroughfare which has been blocked for two-and-a-half years as a result of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.