All three private radio and television stations shut down by the Liberian Government have been reopened. Love FM/TV, Power FM/TV and Kings FM/TV were ordered closed by the Justice ministry on the eve of the presidential runoff election for broadcasting messages mainly by the opposition Congress for Democratic Change, which eventually boycotted the polls.

Swaziland's government has failed to pay more than $10m (£6.3m) in grants to Aids orphans because of its financial crisis, an IMF official has said. Swaziland has the world's highest HIV/Aids rate, leaving some 69,000 orphans. The IMF's Joannes Mongardini said the government should cut its wage bill to ease its financial crisis.

Global Justice Ecology Project has just published the No REDD Papers, Volume 1. 'Your future, our climate and Indigenous Peoples are threatened by a devious false solution to climate change called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). Unfortunately, industrialized countries, oil companies and other climate criminals that are trashing the planet have absolutely no intention of drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions necessary to truly address climate change.'

Kenya's newly-constituted Supreme Court on Tuesday 15 November refused to rule on a date for next year's elections, stoking voter unease over moves by the government to amend a polling timeline already endorsed by a referendum. Under the constitution adopted last year, Kenya was due to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on 14 August 2012, the first polls since a disputed vote in 2007 after which more than 1,220 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. The post-election violence is being investigated by the International Criminal Court.

South African exports to Europe - a major trading partner - had been hit hard not only by the slump in demand associated with the euro-zone debt crisis, but also by the volatility of the rand, which undermined the competitiveness of local enterprises, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies has said. The shaky outlook for exports to Europe could contribute to lower economic growth in the coming year, torpedoing the government’s ambitious plans to boost job creation and reduce poverty. The Treasury cut the economic growth forecast for this year to 3,1 per cent in the medium term budget policy statement last month, and its expectations of it rising to 3,4 per cent next year could prove too optimistic if Europe’s debt crisis pulls that continent into a recession.

Partly inspired by the Arab Spring, partly by their own experiences of living abroad, but mostly by what they say is utter frustration about the huge inequalities that divide Angola, an emerging youth protest group has no fixed political affiliations and no formal leadership, says this IPS article. Starting off with just a dozen people, their support base has grown rapidly, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, and in October they mobilised some 700 people to walk down a main street in Luanda carrying placards saying 'Down with the dictator' and '32 years is too long'. Pedro Seabra, a researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security in Lisbon said: 'Angola is still a very long way off from any sort of Arab Spring but these protests are very new for Angola and very significant. Things are definitely staring to change.'

At double the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, the 40 GW Grand Inga hydropower project, to be built on the Congo River under an agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, will be the world's largest by a wide margin. It will increase Africa's electricity generating capacity by one-third. But as IPS News reports, as is unfortunately typical with many big-push style projects in the developing world, the local people will likely get little of the electricity produced by the Grand Inga. Instead, the power transmission lines are expected to go towards mining and industrial facilities, towards the big cities in South Africa and Egypt, as well as possibly being exported to Europe.

Human Rights Watch has urged the new government in Egypt against deporting Eritrean asylum seekers who are currently being detained in the North African country. The international advocacy group said Egyptian authorities are preparing to forcibly return a group of 118 Eritreans including recent deserters from the Eritrean Army; accusing Cairo of renewing the trend of mass deportations it exercised in 2008 and 2009. In most cases Eritrean refugees and asylum-seekers upon return are immediately thrown to secret detention centers where they are subjected to severe torture and other in-human treatments, the human rights group says.

Thousands of migrants traverse the road between Djibouti’s capital, Djiboutiville, and the coastal town of Obock carrying little more than a bottle of water and the hope that they are heading towards a better life. They pass through an arid landscape strewn with volcanic rock that sustains little life besides the occasional pastoralist and his goats. Temperatures average around 34 degrees Celsius in winter and in summer can reach 52 degrees. It is just one leg of a journey that, for most, started in Ethiopia or Somalia and for the fortunate ones will end with a well-paid job in Saudi Arabia.

After 23 October elections to the Tunisian Constituent Assembly, strikes have broken out in numerous sectors, including airport, postal and oil workers, against poor wages and working conditions. These strikes underscore popular opposition to the entire political establishment, which has still not succeeded in assembling a government based on the elections, says The 23 October poll gave the right-wing Islamist party Ennahda the most seats in the 217-member Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly is tasked with drafting a new constitution and appoint an interim government.

A spokesperson for the Somali militant group al-Shabaab said that Kenya's prime minister recently visited Israel to seek assistance in 'destroying Muslim people and their religion'. The office of Kenya's prime minister said on Monday 14 November that Kenya received the backing of Israeli leaders to help Kenya fight what it called 'fundamentalist elements'. Kenyan Prime Minster Raila Odinga visited Israel on and sought help building the capacity of his country's security forces.

Thousands of pro-democracy activists demonstrated in Morocco's largest city calling for a boycott of parliamentary elections less than two weeks away. The demonstrations comes as a parliamentary delegation from the Council of Europe noted there was little enthusiasm in the country just two weeks before the election and said there was worry about the level of participation.

National planning commission chairperson Trevor Manuel has handed over a development plan to President Jacob Zuma that deals with nine national issues that the commission has identified as the country's top priorities. The nine challenges are: Too few people work; The standard of education for most black learners if of poor quality; Infrastructure is poorly located, under-maintained and insufficient to foster higher growth; Special patterns exclude the poor from the fruits of development; The economy is overly and unsustainably resource intensive; A widespread diseased burden is compounded by a failing public health system; Public services are uneven and often of poor quality, Corruption is widespread, South Africa remains a divided society. Visit this Mail and Guardian plan to download the full 430-page plan.

Regional leaders meeting for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Angola cornered President Robert Mugabe and told him Zimbabwe could not hold elections without reforms that would guarantee free and fair elections. He was also told last week the region would not accept violent elections. Mugabe suffered a double blow at the summit after his plan to have South African president Jacob Zuma toppled as facilitator to the Zimbabwe crisis was thrown out by SADC leaders, who felt Zuma had done well in trying to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis.

Mauritanian forces killed a top official of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) during an air raid into Malian territory, a Mauritanian security source said. Mauritanian national Teyeb Ould Sidi Aly allegedly headed operations carried out with explosives-filled vehicles against Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and the French embassy in Nouakchott.

Britain is being urged to help close down a legal loophole that lets financiers known as 'vulture funds' use courts in Jersey to claim hundreds of millions of pounds from the world's poorest countries. The call came from international poverty campaigners as one of the vulture funds was poised to be awarded a $100m (£62m) debt payout against the Democratic Republic of the Congo after taking action in the Jersey courts. Vulture funds legally buy up worthless debt when countries are at war or suffering from a natural disaster and defaulting on their sovereign debt. Once the country has begun to stabilise, vulture funds cash in their cheap debt deeds, at massively inflated cost to the countries.

Rights groups in Nigeria fear a same-sex marriage bill being discussed in parliament could boost already prevalent discrimination against homosexuals. The bill goes much further than banning same-sex marriage; it threatens to ban the formation of groups supporting homosexuality, with imprisonment for anyone who 'witnesses, abet[s] or aids' same-gender relationships, and could lead to any discussion or activities related to gay rights being banned.

Damietta locals have vowed to continue their sit-in against MOPCO petrochemicals company despite a decree by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to shut down the plant. One protester was killed in a military crackdown on the sit-in, according to eyewitnesses. Protesters are demanding that governorate officials finally heed their calls to shut down the factory, which they say is 'deadly and hazardous' to residents, marine life, as well as agricultural.

Malawi is experiencing a drug shortage as the country’s international donors remain reluctant to release aid meant for the health sector. About 60 million dollars in funding has been withheld amid allegations of pilfering and corruption in the procurement of drugs at government’s Central Medical Stores. The Central Medical Stores procures and distributes drugs to government health facilities.

As DRC prepares for its third presidential election on 28 November, Antoine Roger Lokongo cautions that external interests in the country’s vast mineral wealth mean that a genuine democracy owned by the Congolese people is likely to remain elusive.