Beliefs in witchcraft and other occult forces are widespread in Africa, as they are in many other parts of the world. Animist beliefs consider death, disease, crop failure and other disasters not as natural occurrences, but as the result of the activities of supernatural powers. Families commonly consult traditional healers who divine the cause of the calamity.

Barefoot with water up to his knees, seven-year-old Isaac sifts through sand to extract copper like hundreds of boys in southeast DR Congo, forced by poverty to quit school and work in the mines.

Isaac abandoned his maths and language classes in February, leaving the only school in Kamatanda, a small village in Katanga province, the main mining region in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Tucked away in a bill to rewrite the rules on Wall Street, which President Barack Obama is set to sign next week, are provisions to cut into illicit trade in four minerals often used in consumer electronics like mobile telephones.

Nearly two million Congolese have been displaced from their homes in years of conflict in the east
About 40,000 people have fled their homes in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo following fighting, UK charity Oxfam has said.
The violence erupted at the end of June when the army went on the offensive against Ugandan rebel group ADF-Nalu which is based in DR Congo.

At least 230 people were killed when the overturned oil tanker exploded and sparked a fire in Sange village.
Some of those who died were trying to collect leaking fuel but others were trapped inside buildings, including a cinema, by the blaze.
UN peacekeepers, aid workers and troops have been helping the injured.
The truck overturned in the village of Sange

2008 is a year I will never forget. It was a very special moment in my life and ministry. After a terrible 2007, the Lord started speaking to me about a new season. He started talking to me about a brand new thing. He also took me to a trip to the DRC that I will never forget.

(AFP) – 3 hours ago

THE HAGUE — Former Democratic Republic of Congo vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba's war crimes trial at the International Criminal Court has been pushed back to July 14 from July 5, the ICC said Friday.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a source and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. The majority of this trafficking is internal, and much of it is perpetrated by armed groups and government forces outside government control within the country's unstable eastern provinces.

Here is an old article that tells very well the kind of things that happened in the DR Congo while the world chose to ignore them:

9 June 2010 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has named Roger A. Meece, a United States national with over three decades of international experience, including in a number of African nations, as the top United Nations envoy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).