The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has urged the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to take drastic action against governments of the most dangerous countries for media after it published its annual list of 106 journalists and media personnel killed in 2011. The Federation says 2011 was another bloody year for media and blames governments' failure to uphold their international obligations for the ongoing violence targeting media. In a letter to the UN Secretary General, the IFJ calls for effective implementation of international legal instruments to combat the prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against journalists.

As a nationwide strike and protests against the lifting of the fuel subsidy paralysed Nigeria last week, analysts say the billions of dollars a year lost to corruption in the oil industry could have been used to leave the subsidy in place. 'We know that because of the corruption and irrelevant people placed in certain key positions in the sector, a lot of crude oil is being lost,' Garba Ibrahim Sheka, a senior lecturer in economics at Bayero University in the northern city of Kano, told IPS.

Several events in the last two months have shown that Zimbabwe’s coalition government exists in name only and that Mugabe and his ZANU PF party are now blatantly running a parallel government. Towards the end of December Mugabe unilaterally promoted Three Infantry Brigade Commander Brigadier-General Douglas Nyikayaramba, to Major-General. Not only did Mugabe snub Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in making the promotions, but in June last year Nyikayaramba had told the ZANU PF controlled Herald newspaper that Tsvangirai was a 'national security threat rather than a political one', and suggested the military should step in to deal with him.

A Ugandan advocate for sex workers and homosexual rights, Busingye Kabumba has said prostitution and anti-abortion laws should be repealed to encourage the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young women. Kabumba, a lecturer at Makerere University’s Faculty of Law in Kampala also said there was a 'need to streamline the Ugandan legal framework in light of the international legal structure on the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHRs) for young women in the country.'

The World Bank has identified South Africa and Tanzania as having some of the highest costs for remittance payments in the world, with some charges as high as 25 per cent of the money being transferred. Remittance payment is the transfer of money across borders, often used by immigrant workers to send money home to family members. In 2010, the African diaspora sent home $40-billion in remittance payments to the continent, with these money transfers representing close to 10 per cent of some African countries' gross domestic products

The Kenyan security forces are beating and arbitrarily detaining citizens and Somali refugees in Kenya’s North Eastern province, which borders on Somalia, despite repeated pledges to stop such abuses, Human Rights Watch said. On 11 January 2012, in the latest of a series of incidents documented by Human Rights Watch since October 2011, security forces rounded up and beat residents of Garissa, the provincial capital, in an open field within the enclosure of the local military camp. A Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed the incident.

Brazil, for decades a source of migrants to the United States and Europe, is now facing its own humanitarian challenge: applying the international solidarity it trumpets to the Haitians who are arriving in the thousands, in search of a better life. Drawn by the economic boom in Brazil, now the world's sixth largest economy, and the major infrastructure works in preparation for the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games to be hosted by Rio de Janeiro, some 5,000 Haitians have flocked to this country since the earthquake, according to the Institute of Migration and Human Rights.

As the ANC celebrates its 100th anniversary, has it remained true to its founding principles? Did a section of the party sell out the dispossessed with the Freedom Charter in 1955?

The outbreak of anger and revolt in Nigeria cannot be attributed entirely to the removal of the oil subsidy by the government. The people are rising against decades of astounding poverty, insecurity and utter disillusionment.

As the world celebrates with the ANC, they have put up a pretty convincing picture of freedom while everywhere people are broken by the burdens of poverty. Where is the people’s celebration?

‘The ANC has had its shameful moments but it has also had its glorious moments; and it has often been far closer to the best of the spirit of the age than any of the forces it opposed.’

Southern Africa’s ‘democracies’ do not produce citizens but subjects controlled by governments due to the hierarchical nature of the region’s politics, which demands obedience. But for how long will this go on?

The Angolan government has warned Namibians living illegally in that country to get their papers in order. Namibians living or grazing their cattle in the Cunene and Quando Cubango provinces bordering Namibia have been urged to apply for residence permits to have legal status in Angola. This was done at a meeting held at Olupale in Quando Cubango Province which was attended by Namibians and Angolans and was addressed by the Cunene Province governor, Antonio Ndidalelwa.

This publication seeks to provide a gender analysis of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement from the perspective of the participation of women in peace building and conflict resolution, and how peace agreements facilitate or hinder gender equality in post-conflict situations. The analysis was developed through a series of meetings convened by the Feminist Institute of Southern Africa (FISA) and the publication is a collaboration between FISA and the States in Transition Observatory of Idasa.

European banks, pension funds and insurance companies are increasing global hunger and poverty by speculating on food prices and financing land grabs in poorer countries, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth Europe. The report analyses the activities of 29 European banks, pension funds and insurance companies, including Deutsche Bank, Barclays, RBS, Allianz, BNP Paribas, AXA, HSBC, Generali, Allianz, Unicredit and Credit Agricole. It reveals the significant involvement of these financial institutions in food speculation, and the direct or indirect financing of land grabbing.

When South Sudan became an independent state in July 2011, northern Sudan lost most of its oil fields to its new neighbouring country. In an effort to revive the country's struggling economy, the Sudanese government has been selling or leasing vast swaths of fertile land to foreign investors. But in areas where agricultural land is the basic source of living for people, there is much anger over what farmers say is a government policy that promotes foreign land grabs, favouritism, and exploitation, reports Al Jazeera.

Amnesty International (AI) has repeated its call for the Nigeria police force to stop shooting at protesters and urged President Goodluck Jonathan to commit to protecting people, after several deaths and injuries were recorded in street protests. The global rights organisation urged the Nigerian authorities to reform the country's police regulations in line with international standards, to prevent additional loss of life and ensure that the police only use firearms when it is strictly necessary to protect life.

A hundred former Mauritanian refugees, repatriated from Senegal, have staged a protest outside the National Assembly, demanding that their agricultural land, confiscated after their expulsion in 1989, be returned to them, PANA reports. They are also asking that their documentation be completed in accordance with the government regulations, Makasi Diakhite, himself a former refugee, said.

The Tunisian revolution was, famously, initiated by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, a young man in a provincial town who set himself alight in front of the town hall in protest at petty corruption and his inability to make a living. In the six months immediately after Bouazizi's death (he took two weeks to die from his injuries) at least 107 fellow Tunisians tried to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire, according to statistics reported by the BBC.

Gado's take on the celebrated Senegalese musician's announcement that he will run for president in elections this year.

Kenya's Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza is under investigation by the judiciary and police after a guard at a supermarket in Nairobi claimed that the judge threatened to shoot her when she (the guard) requested to search Baraza before she could be allowed into the store.

30 January 2012 is the latest date set for the sentencing of Zoliswa Nkonyana’s murderers, according to blog Writing Rights. Nkonyana was killed because she was lesbian. Activist Zackie Achmat writes in commentary on a reposted news article on the site that the inefficient, ineffective and unjust criminal justice system in Khayelitsha and throughout our country continues to punish Nkonyana’s family and friends with the delay in sentencing the killers. The Social Justice Coalition together with Equal Education, Treatment Action Campaign and Triangle Project have instituted a formal complaint for a Commission of Inquiry into SAPS, the Metro Police and the other agencies.

For the last seven years, the women of Fitampito have been defying tradition by helping their husbands to farm. Local traditions did not permit women to work the land. But that era is over, reports Farm Radio Weekly. Since women started farming in a few isolated villages in the High Matsiatra region, yields have improved significantly. In three years, rice yields have increased from two tonnes per hectare to five tonnes.

Ethnic and religious violence in Nigeria claimed 16 more victims, with gunmen killing eight in the north and a mob torching an Islamic school in the south, as a fuel strike added to the deadly tension. Amid the sectarian and social turmoil, Nobel literature prize laureate Wole Soyinka, one of the country's most respected voices, warned that the continent's most populous nation was heading toward civil war.

The political unrest that rocked Egypt last year seems to have shaken the country's law enforcement apparatus, creating loopholes for organ traffickers. During that period, cases of organ trafficking of Sudanese refugees and other political asylum seekers in Egypt have gone up. A report by the Coalition for Organ-Failure Solutions (COFS), a non-profit international health and human rights organisation, indicates that human traffickers in the North African country are increasingly targeting Africans, especially refugees and other immigrants.

Michael Kofi Ameko, a close aide to Kwame Nkrumah, died just before Christmas at the age of 85. His life was one of public service to the cause of Ghana and Africa.

With months of violence and political turbulence in Egypt, it is the hybrid military-civilian deep state and its manipulations that could be the greatest cause for worry.

Since 2005, the US State Department has been using hip-hop as a bridge for foreign cultural diplomacy. Operating under the auspices of then-public diplomacy undersecretary Karen Hughes, the 'Rhythm Road' program began sending 'hip-hop envoys' to, mostly, the Middle East, hoping to promote transnational understanding through music and dance, writes Julianne Escobedo for 'The State Department's actions mirror its efforts during the Cold War, when they dispatched prominent jazz musicians to counter Soviet propaganda about life in America. The Al-Jazeera piece brings up that this program sends Muslim hip-hop artists, in particular, to Muslim-majority countries to discuss their experience in the United States.'

A staggering $32 billion is missing from the state coffers of Angola, a nation that is steeped in poverty, blatant social inequality, and among the worst-ranked in the world for its life expectancy, infant mortality and corruption. New York-based Human Rights Watch said in December that the government of Angola should promptly provide a full public accounting for $32 billion in missing government funds, thought to be linked to the country's state oil company Sonangol.

Last month, on the other side of the Atlantic, the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell's operation caused from 1m to 2m gallons of oil to spill into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria, also as the result of an industrial accident. 'You may wonder where the outrage against Shell is?' asks Michael Keating in this article on the website. 'To say that it is nonexistent except for a few responses from the environmental community would be an understatement. The simple fact is that Shell and its "sisters" in the West African oil patches are rarely scrutinized except in the most egregious cases – which this one surely is – and the world seems to simply expect that the people of Nigeria should live with these sorts of occurrences because they unfortunately lack the political and media clout to do otherwise.'

Investigators in Ivory Coast have unearthed a body which they say may belong to Franco-Canadian journalist Guy-Andre Kieffer, who went missing in country's economic capital Abidjan in 2004, his brother told France 3 television. The team of French and Ivorian investigators have sent samples from the body, exhumed in the Issia region several hundred kilometres (miles) to the northeast of Abidjan, to France for genetic identification tests.

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for 'indecent behavior', according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has condemned the repeatedly adjournment of the case of the Moroccan rapper Moaz Belghawat, a member of the February 20 movement, the continuing of his imprisonment and the authorities’ arbitrary rejection to release him even temporarily. Al-Haqed was arrested on charges of assaulting a member of the 'The Royal Youth Movement' called Mohammed El-Dali, and has been languishing in Casablanca’s Akasha prison for more than 100 days.

'I believe that African movements are in a process of emerging from the control of the big NGOs that have historically managed their struggle. La Via Campesina in Africa shows that this process will be as powerful as it has been in Latin America, or even more powerful, because this is an awakening that allows them to say, maybe for the first time, "we can speak for ourselves, nobody can speak for us".' In this interview with Alberto Gomez, the national director of UNORCA (Unión Nacional de Organizaciones Regionales Campesinas Autónomas) in Mexico, he discusses the UN climate summit concluded in Durban in December and what it means for agriculture.

Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande's 'wonderful problem' came back to haunt him when a woman was killed and 17 people injured in a stampede at the University of Johannesburg. Speaking at a hastily convened press conference following the accident, Nzimande announced that the department would move to a "central application process" to alleviate problems regarding university registrations. This was a far cry from the minister's comments last year when he brushed off criticism of the large queues outside the University of Johannesburg (UJ), calling it a 'wonderful problem'. In a repeat of last year's chaos, hundreds of matriculants queued outside the university once the matric results were released seeking to submit late applications for study.

Alexandre Manguele, the southeastern country's health minister, announced that the first ARVs produced in Mozambique, in partnership with Brazil, will be ready by July 2012. In doing so, it will be the first African country – rather than private sector supplier – to produce its own stocks of the drug, which can prolong the lives of HIV sufferers by decades.

This course is an intensive introduction to System Dynamics, a unique framework for understanding and managing complex development problems. Through case studies and practical exercises, the course will equip participants with the knowledge and skills required to effectively understand, map, and analyze complex national and global development challenges using a systemic perspective, and to determine the best approaches to mitigate them. The course is designed for professionals working in the field of development planning, especially policy advisors/analysts, and implementation and evaluation specialists from government institutions, research institutes, advocacy and civil society groups, private foundations, and international development agencies.

This project includes the virtual Center for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema, which features a Primer for African Women Cinema Studies, a guide to the film and book, Sisters of the Screen as well as a timeline, related links, and 'voices' of African women in cinema from diverse sources. Moreover, it includes the ever expanding features of the Internet, Facebook pages, Youtube Channel (including Vimeo and Dailymotion, and Blog).

Minority Rights Group International (MRG) has condemned the recent attacks between the Lou Nuer and Murle communities in Pibor, Jonglei state, South Sudan, and called on the government to take immediate steps to protect civilians from all ethnic groups. 'In the long term, the government must also address the root causes of violence among minority communities through political representation, disarmament and equitable distribution of natural resources.'

Formal women’s groups have historically been a part of the social and political organisation in the Niger Delta. Though these have tended to be based around cultural activities, they have also provided women-only spaces to organise voices of inclusion and assertion, writes Sokari Ekine in an article for Red Pepper. 'The success of women’s protests should not be seen solely in terms of the immediate impact on multinational oil companies. We should consider the wider impacts: the politicisation of women and the bringing together of communities such as the Itsekiri and Ijaw women in Delta State, who were driven into manipulated conflicts by the actions of the state and multinationals.'

Dear Editor,

I’m writing to notify you of two errors in a story on your site that we are kindly asking to have corrected as they are misleading to your readers.

The story is called: Foreign Aid to Mining Firms

The first correction must be made in the following sentence:

'Given Plan Canada’s stated commitment to “work in the best interests of children and the communities in which we work” will they be prepared to risk their multi-million dollar funding to speak out in protection of their “stakeholders” - namely the communities in which they work - should labour unrest become an issue there?'

In fact, the funds for the Burkina Faso project will be directed to Plan-led programs that will be carried out in a completely different part of the country more than 500 kilometres away from the mining operation. Plan’s work will not be carried out at mine sites, therefore there is no source to support the assertion of ‘communities in which they work’. Please ensure this sentence is corrected or deleted.

The second correction is in the following sentence:

'Plan Canada, another beneficiary under the new government initiative, did not return our calls.'

This is not correct and we have confirmation from the writer about this error. Calls were indeed returned to Mr. Nieto – the writer who contacted and spoke with us. Due to scheduling conflicts we were unable to respond to his requests for interviews before the story’s deadline.

The welfare of hundreds of thousands of Somalis who depend on financial assistance from the diaspora is at risk following a decision by a US bank to close down accounts of Somali money transfer companies in the state of Minnesota by 30 December, according to local and international sources. Somalis, both in Somalia and in the diaspora, have reacted with dismay at the move by Sunrise Community Bank, arguing that money transfer companies are a lifeline to millions of Somalis who depend on remittances for their livelihoods.

More than five years after the Front for the Liberation of Cabinda (FLEC) filed a complaint with the African Union (AU) against the Angolan government for alleged human rights abuses, the AU says it is willing to hear the 'merits' of appointing a special rapporteur to investigate the claims. Cabinda is separated from Angola's main territory by the River Congo and a narrow sliver of the Democratic Republic of Congo and accounts for more than half of Angola’s oil production. Cabinda's mineral wealth also includes gold, diamonds and uranium, as well as extensive reserves of tropical hardwoods. Since 1975, the status of Cabinda has been disputed, resulting in one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.

With international diplomacy at the UN deadlocked on issues like climate change, new regional formations offer a way forward.

‘Steve Biko’s words had a profound effect on me. They helped shape my personal outlook and political beliefs,’ writes Roy Trivedy. ‘They also played a key role in helping me decide what I wanted to contribute in life.’

listen

can you hear it pull
the wires and plugs
out of our ear sockets...

The goal of The Young Feminist Fund (FRIDA) is to provide accessible, strategic and responsive funding for young feminist-led initiatives. FRIDA invites applications from groups led by young women and transgender youth under 30 years for grants of up to US$5,000.

Two Swedish photojournalists have been convicted by an Ethiopian court for supporting terrorism, but the Committee to Protect Journalists contends they are the victims of a politicised trial.

A group of South African musicians has recorded a response to Bob Geldof’s 1984 song. Proceeds from the new single will go towards teaching discipline, literacy and contraception at British schools.