Zambia joins in World Tourism Day celebrations
Lusaka: Zambia on Saturday, 27 September 2008 joined the rest of the world in celebrating World Tourism Day.

SOUTH AFRICA

Publishers fight on against EU car ad restrictions
BRUSSELS: The European Parliament's Environment Committee voted last week on a report on the Reduction of CO2 emissions from light-duty vehicles, setting emission performance standards for new passenger cars. Some MEPs have been calling for more advertising provisions that would mean additional regulation for press and broadcasting.

Kenya's ICT bill to be tabled in parliament
Kenya's ICT bill will be tabled in parliament as soon as the house business resumes, Kenyan Broadcsting Coproration said today, 29 September 2008.

Burundi's U-com plans to double users by 2010
Burundi's biggest mobile phone operator U-com plans to double its subscribers in the tiny central African country to 555,000 by 2010, the company said late last week.

AFRICA

75% of travellers say ‘No' to mobile phones on planes
Hot on the heels of the airline, Emirates, Ryanair has also announced that passengers will be able to make mobile calls during flights within weeks. However, according to a recent poll by Wanderlust Magazine, the vast majority of travellers are strongly opposed to the move.

Increasing mobile cellular subscriptions throughout the developing world
[Alina Haddad] Mobile cellular subscriptions have significantly increased since the beginning of the 21st century, averaging a 24% growth-rate between 2000 and 2008. In 2000, 12% of the world's population had cellular subscriptions. Thus far in 2008, subscriptions have surpassed 50% and are expected to reach 61% by the end of the year, equaling 4 billion subscriptions worldwide.

Increased political participation among African women
[Alina Haddad] Millions of African women's progress is challenged by their everyday realities of hunger, violence, exclusion, sickness, and discrimination. According to the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), most African women are worse off today than they were a decade ago.

AFRICA

Mugabe calls for lifting of sanctions
[Bathandwa Mbola] New York: Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has urged members of the international community who have imposed illegal sanctions against his country to lift them, now that the country has a power-sharing agreement in place.

ZIMBABWE

Tsvangirai calls for urgency to address food crisis
Harare: Prime Minister-designate Morgan Tsvangirai says Zimbabwe faces "disastrous consequences" if it does not speed up the formation of a new power-sharing government to deal with the deepening food crisis in the country.

Field schools in Uganda are successful in aiding farmers combat disease
[Nadia Khan] In Uganda, 14 million people and over 3,000 farmers rely heavily on cooking banana for food and income every year. However, in 2001 Banana Bacterial Wilt (BBW) was detected in two Ugandan districts heavy with banana farms.