Nairobi Mayor Geophrey Majiwa was on Monday arrested by anti-corruption agents over the controversial purchase of a piece of land for use as a cemetery. Officials from the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (Kacc) went to the mayor's residence in Nairobi's South 'C' at 7am while accompanied by police officers and took him away to the their headquarters where he is currently being held.

Officials have called on residents of Masindi to take their children to school. This followed a survey that revealed that about 850 pupils of school going age in the remote village of Nyalyanika II are not accessing education. The area councilor, Ms Gladys Matwarwa, said residents had shunned the government’s universal primary and secondary education.

Cheikh Anta Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician famous for his theory that the Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans. Okello Oculi remembers a series of meetings he had with Anta Diop in the 1980s.

Delayed test results often mean HIV patients in Mozambique fail to get timely treatment, but new technology is reducing the need to send tests to far away laboratories, and speeding up test results and HIV treatment. Mozambique’s Ministry of Health has increasingly begun experimenting with new technology to make diagnosing and monitoring HIV patients quicker and easier. After a successful 2009 pilot the country has nationally rolled out SMS or text message printers, which transmit the results of infant HIV tests electronically from two central reference laboratories in Maputo and the northern provincial capital, Nampula, to more than 275 health centres.

As the number of children known to have been poisoned by lead continues to mount, a UN team has recommended the government help communities clean up the informal gold-mining sector, rather than quash it altogether. Some 400 children have died of lead poisoning over the past six months, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), but many thousands more are suspected to have been poisoned. Official figures will be released only once the US Center for Disease Control has finished its two-month survey.

Somalis from south-central Somalia and those in the diaspora have taken advantage of the stable environment in the self-declared republic of Somaliland to put their children through school there, boosting enrolment in private and public education institutions in the region, officials said. 'About 10 percent of 200,000 primary-school children are from south-central Somalia,' Ali Mohamed Ali, the director-general of Somaliland's Education Ministry, told IRIN.

Carl Blidt, the current foreign minister of Sweden, admitted in 2001 that oil was part of the conflict in Sudan. But he has also been a member of the board of directors of Lundin Petroleum, points out this article on The Current Analyst website. 'Now, as a prominent politician in Sweden he seems to be interested in human rights and justice in Africa,' says the article.

Cameroon is one of many African countries being targeted by foreign investors for agricultural lands. As of late, a French investor has taken a huge swath of land for sugar cane and the Malaysian company Sime Darby is in the process of negotiating for 300,000 ha in the southern part of the country for palm oil plantations. Chinese investors are also keen on acquiring farmland in Cameroon. In September 2010, GRAIN visited the Upper Sanaga region, in the centre of the country, to take a closer look at the project of one such Chinese company.

With Zimbabwe’s diamond industry still shrouded in secrecy, the Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW) and three Zimbabweans have petitioned South Africa’s New Reclamation Group for access to information that will shed some much-needed light on its controversial mining operations - and prove whether any of its promises to local communities have been fulfilled. In particular, the petitioners are asking for information relating to whether communities that were forced to relocate were consulted and have been given compensation, whether the requisite schools and hospitals have been provided and whether environmental and safety standards are being complied with.

Uganda is the leading country in gender equality in East Africa, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report 2010. The report released this week ranked Uganda at 33rd position out of 134 countries surveyed worldwide. Tanzania was the second in the EA region at number 66, while Kenya was the least performer at number 96. The report showed that Tanzania has been recording a steep drop since 2006 when the country ranked 24th out of 115 countries.

Nearly 300,000 health workers are fanning out across Africa this week to reach 72 million children as part of a United Nations-backed bid to drive polio out of the continent. Vaccinators will go door-to-door in 15 countries to deliver two drops of oral polio vaccine to every child under the age of five in areas considered to be at highest risk of polio, a highly infectious and sometimes fatal disease that spreads from person to person.

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.

In a message commemorating the death of Thomas Sankara on 15 October 1987, Mariam Sankara calls on the people to continue the struggle not only for justice for Thomas Sankara, but also for Africa.

Neal Hall’s recently published anthology of verse ‘Nigger For Life’ reflects his painful, later-life discovery that in ‘unspoken America’, ‘race is the yardstick by which he is “first” measured and judged’, writes Caribbean Book Blog, revealing ‘his deep sense of betrayal combined with his fervent passion for life and his desire for equality for all.’ Caribbean Book Blog speaks to Hall about his writing.

Tanzanian NGO Sikika and Policy Forum, a network of Tanzanian NGOs, recently undertook an analysis of unnecessary expenditures to find out if government commitments to spend more efficiently were being met. Slashing unnecessary expenditure, their report states, could enable the Tanzanian government to build more than 100 dispensaries in remote areas or buy 5,000 delivery beds to reduce the number of pregnant women who deliver on the ?oors of hospitals and clinics.

Egypt under Hosni Mubarak is economic progress with political paralysis, says Gado.

Francodus depicts Nigeria's 'one man, one vote' policy.

Two political protesters have been killed and several others injured in street clashes with police in Guinea's capital, Conakry, just days before a presidential run-off election. According to witnesses, the police were initially attacked on Tuesday by supporters of Cellou Dalein Diallo, the leading candidate contesting the October 24 poll.

The Global Media Monitoring Project is the only international project that gives an idea of the gender bias of the news media. In the latest GMMP, conducted on November 10 2009, the internet news media was also analysed. The survey looked at 76 national news sites from 16 countries, and eight international news sites. Women's prescence in cyberspace news is a reflection of their presence in 'traditional' news, with a couple of caveats.