After six months, the peace talks in southern Sudan between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and the Ugandan government have made little progress. Here's why.

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A recent article in Lancet published the results of a study data from two clinical trials in Africa that suggest that circumcision reduces a man’s risk of contracting HIV by as much as 65 percent. Going by the articles in Uganda and Kenyan newspapers, this caused quite some excitement.

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By Kin-ming Liu

Hong Kong -- I just returned from a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park where up to 55,000 people (claimed by the organizers; the police estimated 27,000 people) marked the 18th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. This former British colony has been the only place in China where people have the freedom to commemorate what happened in Beijing on June 4, 1989.

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By Njoroge Wachai

There has been a cacophonous debate over whether Kenya’s post-election violence should be characterized as “ethnic cleansing.” It’s a debate that some politicians and diplomats are handling cavalierly. They’re behaving as if a thousand innocent people haven’t had their lives snuffed out in the most brutal way, mainly because they belonged to this or that tribe.

Some, like Chairman of the U.S. House Sub-Committee on Africa and Global Health Donald Payne, are asserting that President Kibaki’s administration is exploiting the term “ethnic cleansing” (first coined in the 1990s to describe the macabre massacre of ethnic Albanians by the Serbs in Kosovo) to deflect charges of election rigging. In a recent hearing on Kenya, Payne said using the term “…plays right into the hands of the Kibaki camp, allowing them to portray themselves as victims of an ethnic conflict.”

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