By Patrick Smith, Editor Africa Confidential

There is a worsening crackdown on journalists in many regions of the world, especially Africa, as governments and businesses struggle to deal with harsher economic conditions.

One of the latest victims in Africa is Ngota Ngota Germain, editor of the weekly Cameroon Express, who died in detention on 23 April in Yaoundé's Kodengui gaol. Along with two other journalists, Serge Sabouang and Robert Mintya, Ngota had been investigating allegations of corruption against Secretary General in the Presidency Laurent Esso and the state oil company.

The investigative programme 60 Minutes traveled to Dr Congo with Enough Project's co-founder John Prendergast to learn how conflict minerals are fueling the one of the deadliest wars in the world. 

Gold and guns ... David LaChapelle's The Rape of Africa. 

The U.N.'s top official in the Congo, Alan Doss abused his influence in the organisation to secure a job for his daughter at UNDP, according to the still confidential preliminary findings of an internal investigation. The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight reached the determination six months after revelations surfaced that Doss wrote an email to a senior colleague pressing the case for his daughter, Rebecca Doss. The U.N. was accused of practicing nepotism by a disgruntled U.N. contract employee, who had hoped to get the job. He bit a U.N. security officer during a scuffle after learning he was being passed over for the job, because of Doss's intervention. The employee, Nicola Baroncini of Italy, was charged at the time with assault, but claimed he was beaten by U.N. security.

This is a cross post from the Word Banks' Conflict and Development blog

There are alarming indications that elements of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, have moved into Darfur and that the government of Sudan may be preparing to deploy them against civilians ahead of the forthcoming referendum in Southern Sudan.

The Enough Project has drawn attention to this ominous development at a time when it is also warning about the militia's attacks on civilians in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A Congolese colonel whose soldiers committed gang rapes, massacres and other abuses with impunity was still getting food, fuel and logistical support months after United Nations human rights investigators described him as one of the army's most abusive commanders.

The Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen took some extraordinary risks to travel to Nhungu, Congo to interview Col. Innocent Zimurinda. He and other commanders were backed by the UN because they were part of a Congolese military operation against a Hutu rebel group associated with Rwanda's civil war. Last October, the UN found "credible evidence" that Zimurinda personally led a massacre of civilians which saw 10 women gang raped. Several had breasts were hacked off.

McCrummen's interview of with military commanders with the blood wof women and children on their hands comes a few days after Nicholas Krtistoff's equally disturbing HBO documentary, again dealing with a Congolese war criminal. 

Shot in the streets of Kinshasa, site of Muhammad Ali's legendary 'Rumble in the Jungle', Karibu Ya Bintou ("Welcome to Life in Limbo") is a short film with music from the 2010 album 'Kinshasa Succursale' by Baloji.

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 18, 2010; C03

The world feels big and yet way too small in "Reporter," Eric Daniel Metzgar's ennobling, intentionally depressing documentary about the relentless work ethic of Nicholas D. Kristof, the New York Times op-ed columnist who writes firsthand about the worst situations every hemisphere has to offer.

"Reporter," which airs Thursday night on HBO, follows Kristof, 50, and two young idealists (a doctor and an inner-city English teacher) into the fractiously ravaged nation of Congo, where Kristof wants to write a column about the reigning warlord. Ideally, he hopes to teach his companions, who won a contest to travel with him, about the value of witnessing the world's atrocities and scintillating them into stories that will call on people to act. Which is what Kristof did with his work in Darfur, Sudan: He caused people -- from George Clooney on down -- to do whatever they can.