The growing illegal trade in chlorofluorocarbons is undermining efforts to protect the ozone layer, campaigners have warned.
A ground-breaking study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has sought to predict what life in Africa could be like by 2025.
South Africa and Brazil came out guns blazing against global trade protectionism and also against the continued administration of Iraq by U.S. forces when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ended a visit here at the weekend.
This week South African president Thabo Mbeki paid a high-profile state visit to India when he took along 11 cabinet ministers to bolster a relationship increasingly important for the country's South-South diplomacy.
A major homegrown economic plan aimed at lifting Africa out of poverty is being stifled by a rash of unresolved political and economic problems, including new military conflicts, the United Nations heard this week.
Against a backdrop of donor fatigue and a deadlock on trade between rich and poor countries, African leaders at a summit here renewed a pledge to keep the world's attention on a continent that is grappling with wars and famine, but also faces new opportunities ahead.
The European Union is taking advantage of Africa's weak bargaining power to bloat the list of conditions - attached to development aid - with further demands.
If Africa is to advance economically and socially, sincere dialoguing must replace armed conflict, strikes and dirty politics, delegates at a heads of state summit held in Swaziland this week agreed.
Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa could earn about two billion U.S. dollars more every year if industrialised countries dropped their trade-distorting agricultural policies and opened their markets to goods from the developing world, says the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Embattled Liberian President Charles Taylor ceded power to his deputy, Moses Blah, on Monday and flew into exile in Nigeria, 14 years after leading a rebellion that triggered a bloody civil war which spilled over into Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire.
The big men of Africa, its heads of state, dominated Mozambique's port city of Maputo last week as their cavalcades careened through the small city's roads.
While the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe is one of the conflicts that captured the attention of United States President George Bush during his trip to Africa, the African Union (AU) is officially silent on that country.
Almost as common as national flags at the African Union summit in Maputo, Mozambique, is the red ribbon symbol of the anti-HIV/AIDS campaign.
Through the centuries, Africa's story has been one of outward migration - from the era of slavery to the present era of migration where hardship and a lack of opportunity have seen many people from the continent seek their better lives elsewhere.
African leaders are beginning to sharply focus their attention on finding ways the New Partnership for Africa's Development - a programme to kick-start the development of the continent - can improve the daily lives of their people.
African leaders are becoming increasingly determined to crack-down on the rebel groups and errant governments whose relentless conflicts are hampering the development of the continent.
-Womens rights in Africa took several leaps forward when the African Union's executive council insisted that equal gender representation to its governing structure would not be diluted.
There is a behind-the-scenes tussle between South Africa and African Union for control of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
South African President Thabo Mbeki hands over the reins of his year-long chairmanship of the African Union (AU) in Maputo this week to President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique.
The operating costs of the African Union are expected to reach as much as 100 million U.S. dollars a year, once all its structures are up and running.
-African Union ministers of trade have called on the Cancun Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in September to focus on developmental concerns in the existing agreements and not to start negotiations for new agreements.