Nairobi

Finance ministers from across Africa gather in the Ethiopian capital this week for the the 38th annual meeting of the African Development Bank group (ADB), where attention will focus on easing the economic woes of the world’s poorest continent.

There is no lock on the door, no phalanx of guards, no visible impediment to the drugs leaving the glass chamber that the laboratory technicians call a ”stability room”. The pills come in little white boxes with labels such as lamivudine, zidovudine and efavirenz, technical names disguising the fact that these tablets are the stuff of life.

A decade ago, many saw newly independent Eritrea as a beacon of Africa’s democratic potential, but these days, political freedom, elections, and a free press are nowhere in sight in the Horn of Africa country.

Bodies lay in the streets of the DRC town of Bunia on Friday, following a day of clashes between rival militia groups vying to fill a power vacuum left by departing Ugandan soldiers, witnesses said.

Africa must help its 11-million Aids orphans or risk them being driven to the margins of society, All Africa Conference of Churches President Kwesi Dickson warned on Wednesday.

Associates of former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi must hand back millions of hectares of land seized or ”inappropriately” given to them, or see it repossessed, the government warned this week.

Kenyan Vice President Michael Wamalwa on Monday urged the international community and UN agencies to address the plight of slum dwellers around the world, particularly in Africa.

More than a million residents of Nairobi have gone without water since Sunday after floods destroyed a dam in the centre of the country and parts of the capital were expected to be without water for days

Kenya’s parliament has passed an anti-corruption bill which was a key condition to the resumption of donor aid frozen two years ago, an official said on Thursday.

The UN Children’s Fund has granted the Democratic Republic of Congo ,5-million for the implementation of a three-year childrens programme.

Kenyans have expressed outrage over a decision by the country’s 223 legislators to award themselves a multi-million dollar car allowance scheme, barely a month after the government bowed to demands to massively increase their salaries.

Kenya handed over a suspected member of the al-Qaeda terror network to US officials on Wednesday and identified him as Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed.

After a week of war in Iraq, the tourism industry in Africa, often the continent’s economic mainstay, has been hit by falling reservations and growing concerns about safety.

Newspapers across Africa poured scorn on US President George Bush on Friday over the war in Iraq.

South Africa has appointed Welile Nhlapo, the director general of the Presidential Support Unit, to represent the country and Jacob Zuma, the facilitator of the Burundi peace process, in the African Union’s mission in Burundi.

Three men suffocated to death in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa trying to fetch a woman’s mobile phone from a pit toilet, press reports said on Friday.

The president of Burundi has ordered private radio stations not to broadcast statements by opposition rebel groups, media reports said on Thursday.

The world risks losing chimpanzees for good in the next 50 years if human beings continued to hunt them and eat their meat, Kenya’s Environment Minister Newton Kulundu warned here on Wednesday.

Kenya’s public debt rose to eight-billion dollars by the end of December last year, according to figures released by the central bank on Thursday.

Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Police Unit have interrogated officials of Kenya’s Euro-Bank, which collapsed last week, taking with it billions of shillings of depositors’ money, an ACPU official said on Thursday.

The death toll from an outbreak of the deadly ebola virus in a remote northern area of the Republic of Congo has reached 76, the country’s government said late Monday.

An informer killed before laying a trap to catch a key Rwandan genocide suspect was courageous, the United States embassy in Kenya said on Thursday.

Thirty-eight people in the Republic of Congo have died in a suspected outbreak of the deadly ebola virus, the country’s health ministry said late on Tuesday.

Eritrean President Isayas Afewerki has described Ethiopia as the ”spoilt child of the world’s superpowers”.

An alarming report on the world-wide contamination of mercury is one of the topics to be addressed by the UN Environmental Programme conference that opened on Monday in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Authorities in the DRC capital, Kinshasa, have opened a judicial inquiry into massacres and cannibalism alleged to have been perpetrated by Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Mouvement de liberation du Congo and its ally, the Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie-National of Roger Lumbala, in the northeastern DRC.

Southern Sudanese rebels will on Tuesday meet mediators for peace talks with the government to discuss how to resolve a dispute over Khartoum’s alleged violation of a ceasefire, a rebel representative said.

A plane carrying members of Kenya’s new government crashed in western Kenya on Friday, killing one minister, the two pilots and injuring at least three other ministers, a government minister and a private television network said.

Smugglers are using the Central African Republic to get illicit diamonds out of the continent’s conflict zones, according to a report released Monday.

Among those riding the wave of optimism in the wake of the opposition’s overwhelming and unprecedented election victory in Kenya last month is the east African country’s beleaguered coffee sector, which gives work to half-a-million farmers.