A letter has been sent to shareholders and potential investors of Coal of Africa (CoAL) demanding that they reconsider their plans to support the company and it's project in Limpopo, South Africa.

The faith community is among key stakeholders calling for the establishment of a permanent International People’s Tribunal on Ecological Debt. Such a tribunal would hold environmental violators accountable for the climate change they are causing in local communities, particularly in developing nations. This was the main message that came out of a parallel session held by the Economic Justice Network (EJN), the World Council of Churches, Jubilee South, Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalisation, Accion Ecologica, Oilwatch and the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance on 7 December 2011 on the sidelines of COP17. EJN coordinates Councils of Churches from 12 Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) member states.

'The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to bring to your attention the mounting press freedom violations in Egypt. Between November 19 and 24, we documented at least 35 cases of journalists who were attacked in Cairo and Alexandria when protesters clashed with the military and police. We are attaching the list here and ask specifically for you to note the deteriorating state of press freedom in your country.'

A corruption scandal in Sierra Leone could damage President Ernest Bai Koroma's chances of re-election next year and undermine his attempts to rebrand the West African state. Last month a television documentary investigating illegal logging alleged bribery in the office of Sierra Leone's Vice President Samuel Sam Sumana, dubbed 'Timbergate' by the press.

Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzuri has said that 20,103 political prisoners had been released since February when a popular uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak, state media reported. He said that 68 political prisoners remained in detention, including 48 who have been sentenced, the official MENA news agency reported.

Women of Zimbabwe Arise report on a case in which charges against six women were dismissed. In another case, two women face a case seen as an attempt to fix them with criminal charges.??

In Africa, poor medical care for diseases like polio and diabetes, as well as the lingering effects of war in certain regions, have created a large population of disabled people who are often rejected by society, says Hughes Kule, a Congolese-American activist who helped found a shelter for disabled street youth in Bongolo, DRC. 'Most street people here [in the Congo] are disabled people, because they are rejected by family and society. The family considers a disability a curse rather than a malformation. They believe it is a curse, but we believe it is largely because of the war.'

The 30,000 people living in a town in northern Libya have been driven out of their homes, in what appears to have been an act of revenge for their role in the three-month siege of the city of Misrata. So what really happened in the town of Tawergha, are the accusations of brutality against the town's residents fair and what does it say about hopes for national unity? In the middle of August, between the end of the siege and the killing of Gaddafi, Misratan forces drove out everyone living in Tawergha, a town of 30,000 people. Human rights groups have described this as an act of revenge and collective punishment possibly amounting to a crime against humanity.

With just two cholera cases reported in 2011, Guinea escaped an epidemic in West and Central Africa that infected 85,000 people and killed 2,500 in the first 10 months of 2011. Luck, as well as targeted prevention efforts on the part of aid agencies and the government brought this about, specialists told IRIN, but a far deeper countrywide overhaul of the water and sanitation system is needed to diminish the likelihood of future outbreaks.

An Italian man has killed two African street sellers and wounded three others in an apparent racist shooting rampage in the city of Florence before committing suicide, police said. Gianluca Casseri, 50, who Italian officials described as a right-wing extremist, parked his car in the crowded Dalmazia square at lunch time on Tuesday 13 December, got out and started shooting with a large pistol, witnesses said.

On the heels of a decision by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria to cancel its next round of funding, the Swazi government is calling on donors to come to the impoverished country's aid. However, there are fears that the result of a recent Global Fund audit may dissuade donors even as HIV organisations contest its findings. The country is also contesting a recently released Global Fund audit that alleges nearly US$6 million in aid was misused. With an HIV prevalence of about 26 per cent, Swaziland cannot afford to fund HIV treatment domestically - an estimated 90,000 Swazis are in need of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, according to international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières.

The ragtag though powerful Islamist terror group, Al Shabaab, is taking on the Kenyan army on the battlefields of...Twitter, writes Simon Allison in this Daily Maverick article. And they're winning.

This Washington Post article notes that there will soon be more US troops based in Djibouti than in Iraq. Since 2002, Djibouti – a former French colony – has played host to the only permanent US military base on the African continent. Camp Lemonnier has grown steadily from a small outpost to an operation with more than 3,500 military personnel.

The United States Ambassador to Uganda, Mr Jerry Lanier, and the UK High Commissioner, Mr Martin Shearman, have snubbed calls to appear before the parliamentary ad hoc committee investigating the oil sector, the Daily Monitor has learnt. In October, MPs mentioned Mr Lanier’s reports in Wikileaks, an online whistle-blower, where he accused Premier Amama Mbabazi and Internal Affairs minister Hilary Onek as having received bribes from oil companies.

At any given time, an estimated 130,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in forced labour as a result of trafficking. It is a fraction of the global figure, which the International Labour Organisation (ILO) puts at 2.5 million, but this highly lucrative and concealed crime is on the rise in Africa and traffickers usually operate with impunity. Southern Africa has many of the conditions traffickers capitalise on: endemic poverty and unemployment that create a demand for better opportunities, and high rates of regular and irregular migration that mask the movements of traffickers and their victims.

Chad has launched a mass campaign to vaccinate nearly 2 million people against meningitis A, the primary cause of epidemic meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa. This is part of a multi-year immunization campaign covering the 25 countries of the African meningitis belt.

Search Nigeria is a new Search Engine designed to consolidate and improve the availability of information about Nigeria.

The United Kingdom has been surprisingly silent about Nigeria’s harsh new laws targeting homosexuals. This would be the perfect situation for the British government to launch its much-heralded policy of cutting aid money to countries that discriminate against homosexuals, but so far British money to Nigeria keeps flowing, and British officials remain silent, writes Simon Allison for the Daily Maverick.

A Us drone has crashed in the island nation of Seychelles, an incident that comes just over a week after a US drone went down in Iran. The latest crash comes just hours after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base that houses troops assigned to a unit in the horn of Africa and is home to a fleet of drones assigned to fly over the horn of Africa and some areas in the Middle East.

Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda has been officially elected as the next chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and will become the first African to hold the top post at a time when the ICC is almost exclusively focused on the continent. Bensouda, who has served as deputy to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the outgoing ICC chief prosecutor, was the only candidate and unanimously chosen by the ICC's assembly of state parties at their annual meeting in New York. She had previously worked as a legal adviser at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania.