News stories by Arsène Séverin

BRAZZAVILLE, Oct 24 (IPS) - Three weeks after the new school year began in Brazzaville, many students in the capital of the Republic of the Congo have yet to attend a single class. The city is still trying to recover from a huge explosion at an arms dump in March.

Five-year-old Vianey hasn't seen his parents since a series of explosions ripped through an ammunition dump in Brazzaville on Mar. 4. A stranger, Jules Bomboko, said he found Vianey days later, wandering around the Tréchot neighbourhood, a few hundred metres from the site of the blasts.

Authorities in the Republic of Congo are showing an encouraging new readiness to arrest and prosecute people trading in endangered species.

Marguerite Kassa feared she would find herself alone in the small crowd of a dozen other pregnant women at the integrated health centre in Mossendjo, in the southwestern Republic of Congo. 'I am six months pregnant already, but I hesitated to come here before now, because there is so much contempt for us,' the thirty-year-old indigenous woman tells IPS. 'Yet I was warmly welcomed.'

Only two of the eleven countries that share the Congo Basin have validated their plans to participate in the forest conservation process known as REDD+.

It's noon at Jean-Félix Tchicaya Primary in Pointe Noire, the economic capital of Congo. Students are settling into their chairs, but not to resume their lessons. They are waiting eagerly for the hot meal that's served in the classroom each day, their plates already laid out on their desks.

In the hope of strengthening its agricultural production, the Republic of Congo has handed over 80,000 hectares of arable land to a company owned and operated by 14 South African farmers.

The Autonomous Port of Pointe-Noire has evicted 8,000 residents of a fishing village to make way for expanded facilities. The move is a blow to the community's livelihoods, as well as closing down the market that supplied the city's poor with affordable protein.

An emergency vaccination campaign against polio begins Nov. 12 in the Republic of Congo, where an epidemic centred on the southern city of Pointe-Noire has killed at least 100 people since the beginning of October.

'I came here out of curiosity, but I ended up taking an AIDS test. I have the results,' Gerard, 30 years old, told IPS. He adds, right before leaving: 'The results are negative.'