Cameroon

Nearly 25,000 people have signed an AllOut.org petition asking the Cameroon President and Minister of Justice to reverse the decision to jail Roger Jean-Claude Mbédé for three years and to put a moratorium on the laws that sent him to jail in the first place. Roger was arrested last year for sending another man a text message that said, 'I'm very much in love w/u.' He was charged and convicted under Cameroon's law that criminalizes 'homosexual behavior' and sentenced to three years in prison.

The final quarter of the year is the main time of harvest and profit for workers in the cocoa industry, which employs full villages in southwestern Cameroon. But many cite low pay, with women, who are involved in the beginning stages of the process, saying they have no idea what products their labor yields in 'white man’s country'.

Roger Jean Claude Mbédé spent 16 months in prison with robbers, killers and other criminals. All he did was click the 'send' button on his mobile phone. The 33-year-old Cameroonian still can't believe what happened. On 28 April 2011, Mbédé was sentenced to 36 months in prison and fined 83,370 CFA francs (about 127 euros) for 'homosexual behaviour'. His lawyers immediately appealed the sentence and lodged an application for bail, which was rejected.

A review of Michel Roger Emvana’s Paul Biya: Les secrets du pouvoirs. Paris: Karthala. 2005. 290pp.Paper Back $58.45. 2-84586-684-4

Expanding markets from Nigeria to China are fuelling a voracious appetite for more food. A big part of that demand will have to be met by palm oil, a low-cost fat coveted by food manufacturers and a mainstay of cooking across the tropics. Since 2000, world demand for palm oil has doubled. Millions of hectares of forest in top producers Indonesia and Malaysia have been turned over to plantations. That has prompted dismay among environmentalists and brought about tough new rules that are forcin...read more

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