The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and two of his confidants, citing evidence of crimes against humanity committed against opponents of the Libyan regime. Judge Sanji Mmasenono Monageng announced the decision on behalf of a three-judge panel in The Hague on Monday, saying the warrants were meant to force Gaddafi, his son and his intelligence chief to appear before the court and prevent the possibility of a cover-up.

Swaziland opposition forces say the South African government has agreed on a R1.2 billion loan to bail out its cash-strapped government. The Swazi opposition believes that King Mswati III asked President Jacob Zuma for R10bn. Lucky Lukhele, spokesman for Swaziland Solidarity Network based in Joburg, said: 'It is shocking that a government that banned the Dalai Lama from visiting the country in 2009 has degraded itself to being a "sugar daddy state" to a bona fide "feudal overlord",' he said.

Hacktivist group Anonymous says it has dumped onto the web data that it claims was taken from the government servers of several countries. The group indicated this was part of its AntiSec operation, a move to steal data from governments it did not agree with. In a message on its Twitter account, Anonymous claimed to dump data from 'Anguilla, Brazil, Zimbabwe and Australian Government Servers.' Anonymous said it started with the userbase of Zimbabwe, which it said was 'rather small'.

Up to 44 per cent of children in Mozambique suffer from chronic malnutrition, according to an official study. The conclusion was made by the World Food Program (WFP) representative in Mozambique, Lola Castro, and the deputy representative of the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) in Mozambique, Roberto de Bernadi said. Entitled 'Child poverty and disparities in Mozambique 2010', the study analyses child poverty, malnutrition, child abuse and impact of HIV/AIDS.

The African Union (AU) should press Senegal to extradite the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré to Belgium, a coalition of his victims and human rights groups said. 'Time is up,' said Jacqueline Moudeina of the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (ATPDH). 'We would have liked to see Habré tried in Africa, but after 20 years the important thing now is that justice be done somewhere.'

Mauritania said on Sunday 26 June that 17 people were killed in a joint attack carried out with Mali on an al Qaeda in North Africa's (AQIM) camp in the Wagadou forest region near Mauritania's border on Friday. A spokesman for the Mauritanian army said 15 al Qaeda fighters were killed and nine were captured by the Malian army. Seven Mauritanian soldiers were wounded, but two of them died later from their wounds.

Certain antiretroviral (ARV) drugs commonly used in the developing world may be responsible for premature ageing, according to the authors of a new study published in the journal, Nature Genetics. Newer, less toxic but more expensive ARVs are more commonly used in the Western world. Nucleoside analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) have enabled millions of people living with HIV to prolong their lives. 'We noticed that people in their 40s who had been on NRTIs for the past several years had signatures of ageing in their muscles commonly found in healthy people in their 70s and 80s,' said Prof Patrick Chinnery of the University of Newcastle in the UK, one of the study's lead authors.

Nearly 70 journalists were forced into exile over the past 12 months, with more than half coming from Iran and Cuba, says a new survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The report is just one of the ways IFEX members marked World Refugee Day on 20 June. Eighty-two per cent of journalists left their home countries between 1 June 2010 and 31 May 2011 because of imprisonment, or the threat of being jailed, says CPJ. Another 15 per cent fled following physical attacks or threats of violence.

In this Policy Brief PLAAS Senior Researcher Ruth Hall argues that Africa, a continent plagued by chronic food insecurity, is now considered to be the future breadbasket of the world, and is expected to help meet its rising food needs. In the process of cashing in on the opportunities offered by cheap land and water, large-scale investors are displacing land uses and land users in ways that could aggravate the already severe challenges of rural poverty and hunger.

Zimbabwean police Wednesday (29 June) arrested an editor and a journalist from a privately owned newspaper for reporting on the arrest of an ally of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Nevanji Madanhire, the editor of The Standard newspaper, and Patience Nyangove, a reporter, were picked up by detectives at the paper’s offices in central Harare. A manager of the parent company – Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) – was also arrested.

On 16 June the government of Chad signed an action plan to end recruitment and use of children in its national army and security forces. The new action plan is an agreement between the Chadian Government and the United Nations to end recruitment and use of child soldiers. The action plan spells out concrete steps, which when taken, will result in Chad being removed from the Secretary-General’s list of parties who recruit and use children.

On 15 June, the whistleblower web site WikiLeaks began releasing US diplomatic cables from the period immediately following the devastating Haitian earthquake of January 2010. The cables, from among the 251,287 in WikiLeaks’ possession, provide important information on the machinations of US politicians, on their tight control over Haitian government functions, and about their drive to reopen Haiti to capitalist exploitation. WikiLeaks has reached an agreement with Haiti Liberté, a weekly paper and web site published by Haitian immigrants in the US, under which the paper has first access to the Haitian cables and also helps to post them on the WikiLeaks web site.

The agriculture ministers of major economies, rich as well as emerging, meeting for the first time as the world verges on another food crisis in only four years, have disappointed. Their decisions, summed up in a 24-page Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture, lacked the teeth to bite the neck of the crisis, according to food experts and NGOs. Shenggen Fan, director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRPRI), a US-based think-tank, who was in Paris for the meeting, said the G20 did not identify the 'most pressing priorities', nor provide details on how to deal with them to help everyone move beyond 'words and rhetoric to action and implementation'.

Ethiopian authorities have been holding a newspaper columnist incommunicado since Tuesday (21 June), local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reeyot Alemu, a regular contributor to the independent weekly Feteh, was expected to spend the next four weeks in preventive detention under what appears to be Ethiopia's sweeping anti-terrorism law.

'Handbook for Local Journalists in Crisis Areas' is a practical guide for journalists in crisis areas, which is based on the wide experience of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in training and working with journalists in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The handbook teaches international reporting standards, explaining the journalistic process clearly, from subject choice to final editing. The modules are enhanced with examples and extracts from previously published IWPR stories from around the world.

Google Trends, a tool to track internet searching patterns, is a window onto the internet habits of nations, states this article, which examines what can be learned about Africa by using Google Trends. 'By assessing people's searches, and the frequency of key terms in internet news media, it is possible to construct a picture of what matters to people, when, and where. Generally, the patterns that emerge with regards Africa are predictable: an apathetic, uninterested world, whose only interest in the continent appears during the World Cup, or when a ship is hijacked by Somali pirates. Beyond this, however, we can track the associations of global internet users between certain terms to gain a sense of connections between places and events.'

Eritrea has rejected Ethiopian claims it trained the rebels who plotted to carry out bombings during an African Union summit in Addis Ababa in February. Ethiopia routinely accuses Asmara of supporting rebel groups, and declared in April it would support Eritrean guerrillas fighting to overthrow President Isaias Afewerki. Both sides have often traded tough rhetoric since their 1998-2000 border war, which killed around 80,000 people and left the frontier demarcation unresolved.

At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Cancún in December 2010, the World Bank was granted the interim trusteeship of the newly established Green Climate Fund (GCF). Recent events indicate that the Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) will also have an influential role in the design of the fund. The Climate Investment Funds (CIFs), a collaborative MDB climate finance initiative housed at the Bank, are being pointed to as ‘a best practice’ model for the GCF. This paper critically assesses the appropriateness of the CIFs as a model for a global climate finance fund. It finds that in terms of institutional arrangements the CIFs have achieved some notable progress that acknowledges some of the critical issues raised by civil society groups. However, in operations and performance there are serious concerns.

The African Union panel on Libya met on Sunday in Pretoria on mediation efforts to end the four-month war, after South African President Jacob Zuma’s visit to Tripoli last month failed to reach a deal. The leaders of Mauritania, Uganda and Mali as well as Congo-Brazzaville’s foreign minister met with Zuma as Libyan rebels said they expect to receive an offer from Muammer Gaddafi 'very soon' that could end the four-month war.

More than 300 Swazi cancer patients being treated in South African hospitals have been repatriated, according to the Cancer Association of Swaziland, (CANASWA), after the government of King Mswati III could not meet their medical costs. Most of the cancer patients in South Africa were recipients of a special fund for the poor - in the absence of a national health system - but Health Minister Benedict Xaba told parliament recently the fund was exhausted.