DAKAR

The head of the United Nations mission in Côte d’Ivoire, Pierre Schori, on Sunday raised concerns about the humanitarian situation in the west of the restive country where about 14 000 people are at risk of starvation after violent clashes drove out aid agencies from the area.

The United Nations mission in Liberia (UNMIL) has called on the World Bank to scale up its assistance to the impoverished and war-battered country and consider granting it debt relief. UNMIL second in command Jordan Ryan, made the plea late on Tuesday at a meeting with senior World Bank official Robin Cleveland.

The war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is suffering the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis, with 38 000 people dying each month mostly from easily treatable diseases, according to a study published on Friday in Britain’s leading medical journal. Nearly four million died between 1998 and 2004 alone.

Hundreds of young men decked with tinsel wander before mostly Muslim Senegal’s mosques, hawking plastic Christmas trees. Women pray to Allah beneath an inflatable Santa Claus suspended under a bakery’s eaves. While Muslims recognise Jesus Christ as a prophet, they don’t generally celebrate the date of his birth.

Senegalese police detained Chadian former dictator Hissene Habre in Dakar, Senegal, on Saturday — a day after he was released because a court was unable to rule on a Belgian extradition request. Habre’s lawyer, Doudou Ndoye, accused the government of violating the former president’s human rights.

Scientists in past centuries called the sickness by the Italian phrase ”mal aria” — or ”bad air” — for the supposedly disease-bearing zephyrs wafting from swamps. These days, scientists know malaria is spread by mosquitoes. But they describe ill winds buffeting their attempts to halt the spread of a malady that kills one million people a year, and more young African children than any other disease.

African women on Friday acclaimed Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as a beacon of greater influence for their sex and a source of new hope for peace in a continent wracked by male-dominated conflict. Activists hailed the presidential vote in favour of Johnson-Sirleaf, who held an unbeatable lead in the West African state.

Senegal’s private press united on Tuesday in a joint editorial denouncing the day-long closure of a radio network and a wave of arrests, saying ”the monster is still alive” and censorship had put press freedom at stake. ”The authorities have pushed their desire to control the press to a new level,” said the angry editorial published either in print or online by 18 newspapers in the West African country.

While Morocco continues deporting masses of West African migrants in the face of international condemnation, a pan-African human rights group is calling on the United Nations to investigate charges of rights violations linked to border control. The Moroccan government acknowledged on Thursday that its armed forces had shot at illegal immigrants trying to scale a barrier between Africa and Europe last week.

The Chad-Cameroon oil project flouts international human rights guarantees, placing financial interests above the concerns of local populations along the 650km pipeline, Amnesty International said on Wednesday. The governments of Chad and Cameroon have signed controversial agreements with oil companies.

A cholera epidemic in West Africa has killed almost 500 people out of more than 31 000 cases registered this year across the region, the United Nations World Health Organisation said on Thursday. The highly infectious disease, which comes from contaminated water and food, causes diarrhoea, dehydration and potentially death.

South African mediators have deemed that laws passed by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo last month do conform to the country’s peace plan, dealing a blow to rebels who had refused to start disarming and said the laws were inadequate. Opposition parties claimed that the laws, passed without approval by the Parliament, would restrict the number of people eligible to vote in elections.

A lawyer acting for former Senegalese prime minister Idrissa Seck said on Monday that his client was ready to fight allegations of overspending on a roads programme. After a meeeting with Seck, Boucounta Diallo said his client, who is in jail in Dakar, was ” full of humour, ready to face the accusations aimed at him and to fight”.

The United States already buys large amounts of oil from Africa, but both places would benefit from increased trade in an array of other goods, especially farm products, US officials say. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday addressed African producers attending a trade conference in Dakar, Senegal.

Senegal’s former prime minister was on Friday being questioned by police over claims he overspent hundreds of millions of rands on a road project in his stronghold of Thies. Idrissa Seck’s supporters clashed with police in the streets around his home and police headquarters in the capital, Dakar.

Africa expressed grief and shock on Thursday after a string of explosions in London killed at least 37 people, amid concerns that ending African poverty will take a back seat to security issues at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland. ”The world and all progressive humanity are with you,” said President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria.

Failed Guinea-Bissau presidential hopeful Kumba Yala agreed on Monday to accept the results of June 19 polls ”in the interests of peace,” after three of his supporters were killed during a police crackdown on a rally to protest the vote. ”I won the elections, but the results were changed,” he said.

Food crises in Mali and Niger are ”forgotten emergencies,” senior officials of the World Food Programme warned on Wednesday, renewing an appeal for assistance that has gone largely ignored by the international community. The parched soil has yielded little in the last five years, due to successive droughts and inconsistent rains.

Senegal’s Grammy winner Youssou Ndour has been found guilty of assault and battery for a skirmish last year with a local publisher, and ordered to pay a fine and restitution, the plaintiff’s lawyer said on Friday. Yakham Mbaye filed suit against Ndour in January after a litigious battle for control of press group Com 7.

Seventy percent of the world’s poor were women, South Africa’s Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told the Pan-African centre for gender peace and development conference in Senegal. Dlamini-Zuma said that women were being generally marginalised in every human activity.

More than 100 people have died from measles in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, and the surrounding southern provinces, and up to 24 000 people could be infected with the virus, Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) said on Friday. Officially, 115 have died from the disease.

Every morning is a strain for Awa as passengers help to hoist her wheelchair and then herself into one of the multi-coloured mini-buses that ply the dusty roads of the Senegalese capital. Awa, who is in her mid-20s, lost the use of her legs due to a badly delivered injection in childhood. Every day she takes a long ride in a rickety bus to go begging in downtown Dakar, with her one-year-old daughter sitting on her lap.

Three South Africans — world champion Jacques Freitag, hurdler Surita Febbraio and 800m runner Werner Botha — all recorded fine wins at the African Permit International athletics meeting held in Dakar, Senegal, on Sunday. An enthusiastic crowd of 50 000 spectators attended the meeting at the Leopold Senghor Stadium.

Tens of thousands of fans turned up for the first of two Africa Live concerts staged in the Senegalese capital this weekend aimed at raising awareness in the fight against malaria. The musicians took it in turns to appeal for mobilisation against the scourge, which kills one African child every 30 seconds.