In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers.

At an increased risk of HIV and often unable to negotiate safe sex with clients, sex workers have been a major focus in HIV prevention and treatment. However, away from the streets and brothels, their children have been largely ignored. Now a small but growing body of research has suggested that the children of sex workers face a range of HIV risks including early sexual debut, low school enrolment, parental abandonment and psychological issues, including social marginalisation, related to their mothers' work, according to Jennifer Beard, assistant Professor in the Department of International Health at the Boston University School of Public Health.

Zimbabwean government officials insisted on Friday that they would not back down from a plan to require journalists and media houses to pay higher registration fees. Foreign media outlets are now required to pay $6 000 to register in the country, up from $2 500. Zimbabwean journalists working for the foreign press need to pay an accreditation fee of $400 - up from $100.

This paper from the South African Institute of International Affairs notes that oil production in Southern Sudan has 'degraded agricultural lands and caused mass displacement and suffering of local pastoralist and agriculturalist communities'. The paper looks at the legal system around environmental issues arising from oil production in Southern Sudan after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005. This agreement guarantees the right to compensation to those whose rights have been violated by the activities of the oil companies.

Yunis Egbaguru still lives in fear after she fled her village in south Sudan following an attack last month by the brutal Lord's Resistance Army, but she hopes an independent south will better protect her. Known for abducting young girls to serve as sex slaves and young boys to fight, the LRA fought Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's government from neighbouring Sudan's lawless south for nearly 20 years until 2005, when it was ejected from its bases and forced on the move.

Opposition political parties and groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have denounced a bill passed by the ruling party to revise the Constitution as a mandate of 'mass cheating'. In a declaration made available to PANA on Monday, the opposition said the revision of the Constitution to have only one round of voting in the presidential election 'is a dangerous step backward', which would reduce the legitimacy of the president, increase challenges to his power and create instability.

Mohamed Ahmed Noor was under no illusions when he agreed to take on the job of mayor of Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. He was living in the relative safety of London when the offer was recently made. He sat his family down and told them he may not be coming back. 'I explained the dangers of the job, that I may be killed and that one day they may hear on the news that the mayor of Mogadishu has been assassinated, or killed in an explosion.'

South Africa's local government elections are widely expected to take place in May, but since the five-year term ends in March the polls could even be held sooner. Less than 55 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote in the last round of local government elections in 2006 - and many have since been disappointed by their ward councillors. Rhodes University political science lecturer Richard Pithouse says there will be high levels of repression in the months leading up to the local government elections.

Pambazuka News is pleased to announce the call for submissions for the first annual Pambazuka Samir Amin Award. This award, launched to mark Samir Amin’s 80th birthday in 2011, pays tribute to the extraordinary contribution Samir Amin has made to our understanding of the exploitation of the peoples of Africa and the global South.

Police in Malawi have arrested a senior journalist with the sensational weekly tabloid which was briefly banned by authorities in October for not properly registering with the government. Malawi's President Bingu wa Mutharika has threatened to shut down newspapers he accused of lying that up to one million Malawians will need food aid.

IkamvaYouth, a township-based volunteer programme that gets learners out of poverty and into university has once again shown that transformation is possible, despite the odds.

The results of this year’s SA Reconciliation Barometer survey, conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), found that a majority of South Africans still agree that they are trying to forgive those who hurt them during apartheid. Close to three-quarters feel that they want to leave the past behind and move forward with their lives. However, writes Kate Lefko-Everett, the 2010 survey results also reveal some enduring concerns about the delivery of justice that pose challenges to further reconciliation, particularly in a context in which experts, analysts and practitioners have begun to question whether the wounds and traumas inflicted under apartheid may prove to outlast political will to help them heal.

Air Tanzania managing director, Mr David Mattaka, allegedly proposed the use of an 'agent' to push for a multi-billion shillings fleet modernisation deal with American plane maker – Boeing. The claim, in a confidential diplomatic communication from the US embassy in Dar es Salaam, says the ATCL boss implied that the middleman would help to push for the deal that the embassy officials pegged at some $537 million (Sh750 billion) in sales. Mattaka vehemently dismissed the reports and said he did not at any time do what is being claimed in the memos, reports Tanzania's The Citizen newspaper.

A YouTube video is currently creating a stir among the Ivorian online community, reports Global Voices. It shows militaries beating up prisoners in the 'Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction' prison (MACA). According to the person who posted the video, the prisoners are Alassane Ouattara's partisans. Since the beginning of the political crisis in Ivory Coast, dozens of people have been arrested in Abidjan for their political opinion, and jailed at the MACA.

Last week marked the first anniversary of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, leaving a quarter of a million of its people dead, more than 300,000 injured, and approximately a million and a half homeless. One year after this natural disaster, the horrors facing Haiti’s population have only deepened, with a cholera epidemic claiming thousands of lives and a million left stranded in squalid tent camps.

The World Health Organisation launched a plan on Wednesday to stop a form of drug-resistant malaria from spreading from Southeast Asia to Africa, where millions of lives could be at risk. It would cost about $175 million a year to contain and prevent the global spread of the artemisinin-resistant parasite which first emerged along the Thai-Cambodian border in 2007, the United Nations agency said.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s public criticism of Israeli policy towards Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank has triggered accusations of anti-Semitism and calls for him to step down as patron of the South African Holocaust Foundation. Sign a in support of a man whose ‘life has been lived in the spirit of “never again” – the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust.’

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT ) organisations of Malawi have expressed concern over the delay by the Canadian authorities to issue visa to a Malawian gay Tiwonge Chimbalanga. Chimbalanga and his colleague Steve Monjeza hit the headlines following their arrest and conviction on homosexuality charges after going public about their engagement in December 2009.They were later released following a presidential pardon last year.

South Africa has given tens of thousands of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants a reprieve after agreeing to extend the deadline for them to regularise their stay to 31 March. It is estimated that 1.5 million Zimbabweans are in South Africa illegally and most of them do not have proper identification documents.

Khartoum has denied it will take on Sudan's entire debt to free an independent south of any liabilities, after former US president Jimmy Carter said he received assurances the north would do so. The Daily Nation reports that Sudan's foreign ministry 'categorically refuted the statements of the former US president Jimmy Carter to CNN... that the president of the republic told him Sudan's entire indebtedness would be carried by north Sudan,' the official SUNA news agency reported late on Monday.