A September US Court decision dismissed a case against Shell for human rights abuses in Nigeria, with the sweeping claim that corporations could not be held liable under international law for human rights abuses. And a UN Environmental Programme report on oil in the Niger Delta, due to be completed early next year and funded by Shell Oil, is reported to include, without alternate views, claims from Shell that 90 per cent of oil spills from its facilities are due to sabotage or attempts at theft rather than to negligence. The AfricaFocus Bulletin available through the link provided contains several articles and blog commentaries on the two new developments.

A draft pension bill has created great concern among workers in Malawi, with some hurriedly seeking early retirement before it will be passed. The bone of contention is a section pegging the retirement age for women at 55 and men at 60. Labour experts say this age bracket is far too high in a country like Malawi, where the World Health Organisation estimates the average life expectancy at 50 years.

Media watchdogs see the 'invisible hand' of the ruling party behind a string of firings and resignations that have removed some of Egypt's most prominent government critics from their soapboxes just weeks before parliamentary elections. 'Oblique threats and backroom deals that are not visibly linked to the government have started silencing some of Egypt's most critical independent voices,' says Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Middle East and North Africa programme coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The joint task force will meet from 20 to 21 October to discuss the cooperation between EU and AU. It will prepare work for the upcoming Africa-EU Summit on 29-30 November in Tripoli, Libya. Participants will discuss progress in each of the eight partnerships of the Joint Africa EU Strategy, and agree on an action plan for the period 2011-2013, which will be adopted at the summit. Traditionally, the joint task force brings together services from the European Commission and the African Union Commission to discuss cooperation between both commissions.

Uche Igwe calls on President Goodluck Jonathan to address the theft of oil in Nigeria.

Lack of affordable and accessible transport is emerging as a major hindrance towards poorer South Africans accessing state health care, especially for those living in rural areas. The Western Cape is perceived as a well resourced province, but for some HIV-positive patients living in Mooreesburg, accessing treatment means relying on the goodwill of strangers for a lift and running the danger of defaulting on their treatment.

Governments and businesses need an overhaul of policies and strategies to respond to the rapid loss of nature's riches, worth trillions of dollars but long taken for granted, a UN-backed study said on Wednesday. Damage to natural capital including forests, wetlands and grasslands is valued at $2-4.5 trillion annually, the United Nations estimates, but the figure is not included in economic data such as GDP, nor in corporate accounts.

Nearly 400 people died in flooding in central and West Africa, with nearly 1.5 million people affected since the start of the rainy season in June, the United Nations said. It said last year floods killed almost 200 people in West Africa and affected over 800,000 others. Deaths resulting from flood were reportedly highest in Nigeria with 118, followed by Ghana (52), Sudan (50), Benin (43), Chad (24), Mauritania (21), Burkina Faso (16), Cameroon (13), Gambia (12), with other countries reporting less than 10 dead.

The top leadership of Zimbabwe’s civil society organizations will meet with South African President Jacob Zuma’s facilitation team at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Wednesday. The meeting, at the instigation of Zuma’s team, will explore ways of how SADC can help Zimbabwe come up with guidelines for violence-free elections, which are expected mid next year. The poll is expected after the drafting of the new constitution.

Masifundise is a community orientated development NGO in Cape Town, South Africa supporting fishing communities to mobilise and organise at community level to become strong and democratic role players in local community development. As an expanding organisation, Masifundise is desirous take its 30 years of South African experiences across the borders and work towards empowerment of fishing communities and fair re-distribution and management of the marine and freshwater resources.

At the First Forum on South-South Cooperation on Biodiversity for Development, convened in Nagoya on 17 October, the Group of 77 and China unanimously adopted a draft Multi-Year Plan of Action on South-Couth Cooperation on Biodiversity for Development. 'The Plan defines targets and South-South cooperative strategies, including triangular cooperation and programmes, to the year 2020,' said Ambassador Abdullah M. Alsaidi, permanent representative of Yemen and chairman of the G77.

The H.F. Guggenheim Foundation makes grants for scholarly research into problems of aggression and violence. One program is reserved for African Scholars under the age of 35, educated and living on the African continent. Selected applicants will attend a methods workshop to refine and improve their research plans in Accra, Ghana, in March 2011, and after submitting revised plans, will receive grants of $2000 each to support their fieldwork. In 2012 they will be funded to attend a professional conference to present their findings and will receive assistance in finding a publisher for their work.

Egypt, the new chair of the UN refugee agency's governing body, should immediately end its policy of shooting foreign nationals trying to cross from Egypt into Israel, Human Rights Watch has said in a letter to the Egyptian authorities. Egypt should also stop impeding the refugee agency's access to foreign nationals detained in Egypt who want to claim asylum. Member States of the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) elected Egypt to chair the committee for one year on 8 October 2010. Hisham Badr, Egypt's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva will serve as the chair.

If African countries had had the capacity to do climate change projections, their data could have been fed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessments for the continent, said Richard Odingo, former vice-chair of the IPCC at one of the discussions ahead of the Seventh African Development Forum. The IPCC is still recovering from its controversial warning about the impact of climate change on food production in Africa, cited in its synthesis report. The warning turned out to have been based on a non-peer reviewed academic paper for three North African countries.

The Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS) at the American University in Cairo (AUC) is offering the following three winter short courses in January 2011:
1. Introduction to Refugee Law (January 9-13, 2011)
2. Migration/Displacement, Development and Gender (January 16-20, 2011)
3. Community Interpretation for Refugee Aid Settings – CCIP Interpreter Training Short Course (January 23-27, 2011)
Please contact [email][email protected] for more information.

State security agents on 15 October 2010 allegedly blocked accredited journalists from covering the graduation ceremony at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, officiated by President Robert Mugabe. According to the daily NewsDay the state security agents blocked journalists from entering the ceremony, demanding invitation cards similar to those issued to graduates and their relatives in addition to their accreditation cards.

The purpose of the Break the Silence Congo Week is to raise consciousness about the devastating situation in the Congo and mobilize support on behalf of the people of the Congo. Break the Silence Congo Week will take place from Sunday 17 October to Saturday 23 October 2010.

Migration is an integral part of today’s process of global economic, social and political integration. Globally, more than 210 million people are estimated to be migrating. Around 105 million of them are women. There are diverse reasons and causes for migrating, but labour migration driven by large economic and social inequalities in the world is a key aspect in this context. The report 'Women's labour migration in the context of globalisation' offers an introduction to important contemporary political analysis on the influence of globalisation on women’s work, mobility and empowerment.

Using the example of apartheid South Africa, Khadija Sharife reveals the history of how huge oil companies have used flags of convenience in the shipping industry to secure corporate capitalism.

This poem is dedicated to all Ethiopians who lost loved ones during the ‘red terror’ revolutionary days of the Derg regime. Ambassador Teferra Shiawl-Kidanekal, in his book ‘The New Dawn’ depicts that era in vivid language; and he reflects on how ‘the December 1974 incident shocked the whole world and Ethiopians were helplessly subdued as radicals [as] the Derg fully asserted their authority through the barrel of the gun.’ It was a time in history, sadly not extensively documented, in which thousands perished, leaving a hole in the hearts of many families who could never heal them back to whole.

October 16 is the United Nation’s World Food Day. It is a day set aside for?us all to reflect on the fate of the 950 million men, women and?children worldwide that, according to UN statistics, go to sleep?hungry.????

The Right2Know (R2K) Campaign, an umbrella campaign representing a broad front of civil society groups, is campaigning against the Protection of Information Bill - also known as the Secrecy Bill - currently before South Africa's Parliament, which they believe will fundamentally undermine hard-won constitutional rights including access to information and freedom of expression. R2K is currently running a countrywide week of action between 19 – 27 October 2010. Visit their website to find out about events in your area, to sign up against the proposed bill or to join their Facebook or twitter accounts.

Twenty Nigerian citizens and a non-governmental organisation are challenging the indigene/settler dichotomy legally before the Federal High Court in Nigeria. The Federal High Court, Kaduna, presided over by Hon. Justice Mohammed Lawal Shuaibu, adjourned the case to 24 November 2010. The applicants contend that the indigene/settle dichotomy impacts negatively on the enjoyment of fundamental human rights enshrined in Nigeria’s constitution and African and international human rights law.

‘Congratulations’ is a wholly inadequate accolade for Pambazuka's 500th issue.

It's hard to capture the breadth and importance of what Pambazuka does. It is a space, a community, a movement. It is a clearing-house, an archive, a resource base, a forum for radical scholarship, analysis and debate that is not occurring anywhere else.

And of course, it's a journal, and a platform for action, that never compromises on a vision of justice and self-determination for all Africans.

Thank you.

Amnesty International has called on the Egyptian authorities to immediately release, or charge with a recognizable criminal offence, more than 70 members of the Muslim Brotherhood group arrested this week. More than 150 people have been arrested since the Muslim Brotherhood chairman, Mohamed Badie', said on 9 October that the group will put up candidates in Egypt's parliamentary elections, scheduled for 29 November.

New evidence that speculation on food by hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks is fuelling the rise of bread and other basic foods has been released by anti-poverty campaigners on World Food Day, October 16, 2010. The World Development Movement has calculated that over the summer, financial speculators in Chicago alone bought up corn futures contracts equivalent to nearly 1.7 billion bushels - more than the annual consumption of Brazil, a country of some 260 million people and the world’s third largest consumer of corn.

Ibrahim Bello says he can earn $23 in two hours extracting gold from the ground, more than he can make in two months from cultivating millet. Such is the economic draw of the 'gold rush', with impoverished farmers digging up rocks by hand in open mines, that many are in denial about its devastating consequences. At least 400 children have died from poisoning caused by illegal gold mining since March because the ore being unearthed around their villages contains high concentrations of lead, contaminating the air, soil and water.

Zimbabwe’s debt burden of about 8,3 billion dollars, owed to internal and external institutions, is crowding out essential national budget items such as health and basic services, with detrimental effects for particularly women. Indications are that many Zimbabwean women opt to give birth at home, with some children being born HIV positive because their mothers cannot afford the maternity fees or the fees charged at hospitals and clinics for the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV, according to the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD).

FIFA, the world's governing body for football, announced Wednesday that it has provisionally suspended two of its executive committee members who allegedly demanded money in return for their votes in the bidding process for the 2018 World Cup.

Shunned by mainstream society, sex workers with HIV-related illnesses in Nairobi are unlikely to receive help from concerned neighbours. Instead, some of them are being cared for by fellow sex workers. A group of 25 sex workers who call themselves 'Knight Nurses', have been active for a little over a year in the slum of Huruma. They regularly visit fellow members of the group and their family members who are HIV-positive and bedridden to cook for them, wash them and tidy their homes.

Tanzania will go to the polls on October 30, 2010 and the general election campaign is well underway. As the campaigns heat up, presidential candidates and other candidates fighting for parliamentary seats are using new media tools to communicate with potential voters. Along with campaign rallies, which target the majority of the population, a small number of politicians have started to use social media tools such as blogs, online videos, Facebook and twitter to create deeper engagement with voters.

Far from being a panacea for fighting rural poverty, microcredit can impose additional burdens on the rural poor, without markedly improving their socio-economic condition, write Patrick Bond and Khorshed Alam.

Miners work at the physical edges of our consumer society, writes Peter Bosshard from International Rivers, in this Huffington Post article. 'Like the canary in the mine shaft, they are sentinels for the triumph, toil and tragedy of the global economic system. Only days after the miraculous rescue of the Chilean miners, Chinese supervisors shot and wounded 11 workers in a coal mine in Zambia on 15 October. The labour conflict casts a dark shadow on the track record of Chinese overseas investors.'

The Pan-African Parliament (PAP) has adopted recommendations for an action plan to coordinate with regional and national parliaments to ensure African parliamentary budget support for implementation of the July 2010 African Union Summit Declaration on Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa; the AU Summit Decision for the Eradication of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS; and the September 2010 commitments by African governments at the recent UN MDG 10th year review summit.

Regional integration is an economic project with superimposed political structures, while federation is a political project as part of a strategy for political and economic emancipation, writes Dani W. Nabudere, in an examination of why the two ideas, as currently conceived, are incompatible. So what is the way forward for East Africa?

Tanzanians preparing to go to the polls on 31 October are ‘keenly aware that the country’s political future is at stake’, says Salma Maoulidi. Their votes, writes Maoulidi, could redefine the direction of a country ‘jeopardised by the dominance of economic interests and buddy patronage pursued by the government of the incumbent candidate and ruling party.’

On the occasion of African Human Rights Day, 21 October 2010, the Federation of African Journalists (FAJ), the African regional organisation of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), solemnly commemorates this important day by remembering the African journalists who lost their lives in the line of duty as they sought to offer noble service to their audiences. Our hearts also go out to those who continue to drive the spirit of independent journalism at great risk to their personal safety and security in conditions of exploitation by employers.

Ian Smillie’s new book on conflict diamonds in Africa ‘tells the story of a small group of international actors taking on the most powerful forces and institutions on the planet’. Exposing the ‘dilemmas and fault lines of international social justice action, in a deeply intimate and detailed fashion’, it ‘relates an important chapter in the long struggle for global corporate accountability in the resource extraction sector,’ writes Brian K. Murphy.