(AFP) ABIDJAN: US health secretary to make AIDS visit to Ivory Coast: embassy........The US Secretary of Health and Human Services will arrive Wednesday in Ivory Coast to visit projects fighting AIDS and other diseases, the US embassy in Abidjan said Monday. Michael Leavitt will spend two days in Ivory Coast -- where the United States is a large contributor to the fight against AIDS -- to visit organisations fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and avian flu, said an embassy statement.The US president's emergency plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR) earmarked 120 million dollars (80 million euros) to help fight against HIV/AIDS in Ivory Coast from April 2008 to March 2009, according to the embassy. This represents a 43 percent increase over the previous year's budget.The five-year PEPFAR plan is entering its final year and set aside 15 billion dollars to fight HIV/AIDS in over 100 countries. It prioritised Ivory Coast as one of the world's 15 worst affected countries. The US embassy in Abidjan said a second five-year project is likely to be approved by the US government this year.

(AFP) ABIDJAN: Voter registration material arrives in Ivory Coast.... - The first shipment of material to make new voter registration cards has arrived in Ivory Coast, a French company said Monday, in an important step forward for elections that have been repeatedly delayed. The elections are now set to be held on November 30."On Sunday we received a shipment of 1,500 cases of the total of 6,000 that we are expecting," Sidi Kagnassi, a spokesman for the French company Sagem, which is handling the operation, told AFP. "The rest of the material should arrive within a week," he added. Under the peace deal signed in March 2007 between President Laurent Gbagbo and former rebel leader Guillaume Soro, now the country's prime minister, the parties agreed on a voter identification process to issue digital identity cards to all eligible voters among the 19 million population. Sagem, a private security firm, was hired in November to enroll all Ivorians over the age of 18 to update the electoral lists. In the last decade when Ivory Coast was plagued by various conflicts the state had not issued any identity cards. Before the start of the sensitive voter-identification process, Gbagbo said there were about 300,000 eligible Ivorian voters, while the former rebel movement insisted there were as many as three million. There are estimates that the number of voters in the presidential election could be as high as eight million people compared with the 5.4 million voters on the list for 2000 used at the last elections." We have a margin of six weeks for the enrolment of voters once all the material is installed," Kagnassi said without wanting to fix a specific date. However "everything will be done to make sure we can keep the November 30 date".

AFP Abidjan - Le gouvernement ivoirien "rejette" le coup d`Etat en Mauritanie (officiel)........ Le gouvernement ivoirien a "rejeté" lundi le coup d'Etat militaire survenu mercredi 6 août en Mauritanie et a réaffirmé son "attachement au respect des règles et principes de la démocratie", selon un communiqué officiel transmis à l'AFP à Abidjan."Le gouvernement ivoirien appuie la déclaration de l'Union africaine concernant notamment +le rejet par l'UA de tout changement anticonstitutionnel de gouvernement et de toute tentative de prise de pouvoir par la force+", souligne le texte, rappelant que "le pouvoir en Mauritanie est issu d'élections libres et transparentes".
Le gouvernement a également réaffirmé "son attachement au respect des règles et principes de la démocratie et engage tous les acteurs de la vie politique africaine à les respecter". Le président ivoirien Laurent Gbagbo a condamné jeudi les coups d'Etat en Afrique qui sont parmi "les motifs du retard du continent", mais sans évoquer spécifiquement celui survenu en Mauritanie."Que Dieu bénisse l'Afrique et qu'il fasse en sorte que les coups d'Etat cessent sur notre continent", a déclaré M. Gbagbo lors de la cérémonie de célébration du 48e anniversaire de l'indépendance du pays. Le chef de l'Etat mauritanien Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, premier président démocratiquement élu du pays, a été arrêté mercredi 6 août à Nouakchott au cours d'un coup d'Etat sans effusion de sang mené par le chef de la garde présidentielle qu'il venait de limoger.La junte, dirigée par le général Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, a promis une élection présidentielle "libre et transparente" dans "une période qui sera la plus