By Aaron Maasho ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia began diverting a stretch of the Nile on Tuesday to make way for a $4.7 billion hydroelectric dam that is worrying downstream countries dependent on the world's longest river for water. The Horn of Africa country has laid out plans to invest more than $12 billion in harnessing the rivers that run through its rugged highlands, to become Africa's leading power exporter.

Some 200 indigenous activists and fishermen have been occupying the main construction site at Brazil's controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon and are demanding government involvement in the negotiations. "We want to be heard. We want a close representative of President Dilma Rousseff to come and see us," chief Valdemir Munduruku, one of the leaders of the occupation, told AFP by telephone Monday.

Bangladesh has opposed the construction of two hydro-based power projects along the Indo-Bangladesh border in Meghalaya until the two countries sign a water sharing agreement, Power Minister Clement Marak informed the state Assembly today.A Bangladesh Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) member in his letter to the Union Ministry of Water Resources had said the two dams might cause adverse impacts in various sectors in Bangladesh due to change of water flow, Marak said replying to a call attention motion moved by opposition United Democratic Party leader Paul Lyngdoh.Meghalaya is in

The power loadshedding has, for some years, been direly impacting the country’s economy. Adding to its baggage of closed industrial units and lost jobs, declining exports and reserves, are the progressively longer outages, with little respite in sight. And that could not but spell bleaker economic prospects to which the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has drawn attention in its annual report, Asian Development Outlook.