Home Affairs Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma must try again to be elected as the African Union Commission chairperson, the Southern African Development Community decided at the weekend. Foreign ministers from SADC countries met in Cape Town at the weekend, where her recent defeat at the AU summit in Ethiopia was discussed. Dlamini-Zuma contested the election against Jean Ping, the AU Commission head, who was standing for a second term.

As the body count rises from the conflict between members of the separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) and the Senegalese army, Casamancais are starting to lose hope that they will ever see a path to peace. The latest in a string of killings by rebels took place on 14 and 15 February in Sindian (near the Gambian border 100km north of the Casamance capital Ziguinchor), when four Senegalese soldiers were killed and nine wounded in clashes with the MFDC during a Senegalese army search mission for MFDC fighters and bases. Casualty numbers on the MFDC side are unknown.

The DRC Government has pulled three media stations off air. The media houses, two close to opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba and one belonging to the Roman Catholic Church, saw their signals stopped by the ministry of Information. 'Last Friday, we just received a letter from the minister of Information urging us to refrain from broadcasting commercial advertisement allegedly because, as a private community media, we are not allowed. We do not know why exactly our signal has been stopped,' Mr Patrick Nsiala, the programme officer of the Catholic TV (RTCE) told the Africa Review. Unconfirmed reports indicated that the minister for Information, Mr Lambert Mende, had invited the affected media houses for talks.

An estimated $50-billion is exported out of the African continent illegally every year, former president Thabo Mbeki said on Saturday. Mbeki was speaking at the launch of a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) high level panel in Johannesburg. The panel, chaired by Mbeki, would investigate illicit and financial flows of finance out of the continent.

Rethinking development: global and regional alternatives for the development in the South

African applicants should send their applications to:
CODESRIA,
2012 South-South Summer Institute,
BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, SENEGAL
Tel: (221) 825 9822: Fax: (221) 824 1289
E-mail: [email]south.institute@codesria.sn
Website: www.codesria.org

Asian applicants should send their applications to:
CODESRIA,
2012 South-South Summer Institute,
BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, SENEGAL
Tel: (221) 825 9822: Fax: (221) 824 1289
E-mail: [email]south.institute@codesria.sn
Website: www.codesria.org

and

CLACSO,
2012 South- South Summer Institute
Callao 875, 3º (1023) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
Tel: (54 11) 4811-6588 / 4814-2301; Fax: (54 11) 4812-845
E-mail: [email]sur@clacso.edu.ar
Website: www.clacso.org

Latin American and Caribbean applicants should send their applications to:
CLACSO,
2012 South- South Summer Institute
Callao 875, 3º (1023) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
Tel: (54 11) 4811-6588 / 4814-2301; Fax: (54 11) 4812-845
E-mail: [email]sur@clacso.edu.ar
Website: www.clacso.org

'LGBT Liberians live in fear, disempowered and daily imperiled. The war for them has not ended. Their lives are defined by danger and violence, persecution, hate speech and threats, discrimination and harassment. They are stigmatized, publicly rejected and almost completely abandoned by government. Their vulnerability affects all areas of their lives – church, school, employers, landlords, media, street mobs, rapists, predators, political actors, opinion leaders, family.'

A French court has declared the US biotech giant Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides. In the first such case heard in court in France, the grain grower Paul Francois, 47, said he suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto's Lasso weedkiller in 2004. He blames Monsanto for not providing adequate warnings on the product label.

Egypt's first presidential elections since a popular uprising ousted veteran leader Hosni Mubarak a year ago will be held in the first week of June, officials were quoted as saying on Sunday. 'The election will start in the first days of June and will end in the last week of June if there is a run-off,' Ahmed Shams El-Din, a member of the presidential election committee told the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. The head of the electoral committee Faruq Sultan told a press conference on Sunday that hopefuls can register for the election starting from March 10 to April 8.

An estimated six per cent of Kenyan couples - about 344,000 - are HIV discordant, while a further 22 per cent of couples know the HIV status of their sexual partners. Although Kenya has national guidelines for promoting prevention among people living with HIV, implementing them has proved to be a challenge. Dr Charles Okal, the AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD) Coordinator for Nyanza Province says providing services for discordant couples is made difficult by the fact that testing is the only way to find them, yet couples rarely turn out for testing together.

Top United Nations officials say 10 million people need help amid a food crisis in West Africa's Sahel region. UN Development and Humanitarian chiefs Helen Clark and Valerie Amos called Saturday for greater humanitarian response to the crisis that effects eight countries, including Niger.

An alleged police hit squad exposed by the Sunday Times is being investigated for at least 51 suspicious murders - including one in its offices and another in its toilets. The body count is higher than initially thought - and 18 KwaZulu-Natal police officers are now suspects. They include two from the National Intervention Unit and 16 from the notorious Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit. The Sunday Times initially investigated seven cases involving the Cato Manor unit and 16 suspicious deaths.

Swaziland and Lesotho have the highest HIV prevalence in the world. They also share another distinct feature: during the last century, they sent a large numbers of migrant workers to South African mines. This paper examines whether participation in mining in a bordering country affects HIV infection rate.

Sixteen Tanzanian human rights defenders were arrested on 9 February. In protest against the Tanzanian authority's act that goes counter their state commitment to protect, respect and fulfill human rights, Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) has drafted a letter urging the Tanzania authorities to release and drops all charges against these activists. They are requesting people to support the 16 activists by:
1. printing and delivering/posting the letter to the president's office in Dar-es-salaam if based in Dar-es-salaam or any part of Tanzania
2. printing and delivering the letter to the Tanzania embassy/consulate in your country if based outside Tanzania,
3. adapting the letter and putting it on your organisation's letter head, signing it and delivering it to the president office or the representative of Tanzania government in your country.

The Journal of Peace Research has published a special issue on climate change and conflict that constitutes the largest collection of peer-reviewed writings on the topic to date. The research covered in the journal includes:
- The publics' concern for global warming: A cross-national study of 47 countries
- African range wars: Climate, conflict, and property rights
- Climate change, rainfall, and social conflict in Africa
- Come rain or shine: An analysis of conflict and climate variability in East Africa
- Climate change, violent conflict and local institutions in Kenya's drylands
- Climate clashes? Weather variability, land pressure, and organized violence in Kenya, 1989-2004
- Does climate change drive land-use conflicts in the Sahel?
- Climate variability, economic growth, and civil conflict
- Civil war, climate change, and development: A scenario study for sub-Saharan Africa
- Climate-related natural disasters, economic growth, and armed civil conflict
- Don't blame the weather! Climate-related natural disasters and civil conflict
- Could climate change precipitate peace?
- Climate change and the institutional resilience of international river basins
- Weathering climate change: Can institutions mitigate international water conflict?
- Climate change and international water conflict in Central Asia
- Climate change and security in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

Hundreds of villagers and town residents of Liberia’s Grand Cape Mount Country have attracted nationwide attention in their bid to recover what they say is land seized from them and turned over to a Malaysian agro-industrial concern. A petition sent to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s office in January by the aggrieved people’s political representatives demanded the return of their land.

Police are detaining leading Senegalese rappers Simon and Kilifeu as nationwide protests continue to rock the West African state. The security personnel Friday fired tear gas as well as rubber bullets to disperse pro-opposition demonstrators, comprised mainly of rappers called Y en a marre (enough of it). Simon and Kilifeu were arrested after they managed to surface in the city centre at the head of dozens of their colleagues, after they bypassed several points manned by armed riot police.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder is trying to rewrite history and suggest that settlers and colonialists found South Africa as a 'house to let', the Young Communist League of South Africa said on Sunday. 'The fact is that land was dispossessed violently and through bloodshed, and ultimately legislated in 1913, leaving Africans with no choice but to subject themselves to wage exploitation in the mining industry,' league secretary Buti Manamela said in a statement on its lekgotla.

In South Africa, policy with respect to HIV/AIDS has had a strong rights-based framing in line with international trends and in keeping with the constitutional overhaul in the post-Apartheid era. Since HIV in this setting has heavily affected women of reproductive age, there has been discussion about the particular needs of this subgroup, especially in the context of service integration. This paper is concerned with the way in which HIV positive women conceptualise these rights and whether they wish and are able to actualise them in their daily lives.

The Refugee Law Project (RLP) is an outreach project of the School of Law, Makerere University. Our Mission is to empower asylum seekers, refugees, deportees, IDPs and host communities to enjoy their human rights and lead dignified lives. RLP is currently seeking to appoint a number of staff, including the following: Human Resources Manager, Research Analyst, Volunteer English For Adults (EFA) Instructor, Volunteer Lawyer – Durable Solutions, Volunteer Lawyer – Gender & Sexuality, Volunteer Assessment Assistants, Finance Assistant and Volunteer Finance Assistant, Office Assistant, Community Interpreters.

February is the hottest month in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and Mading Ngor, a reporter and presenter for the Catholic-owned Bakhita FM, trudged his way through the heat to cover parliament proceedings last week - only to be thrown unceremoniously out of the assembly. 'Before I had time to argue, four security guards pinned me to the ground and dragged me across the floor, tearing up my trousers,' Ngor, a hard-hitting, critical journalist, told me. The ensuing furor included apologies, a protest, an opinion column, a committee investigation, parliamentary debate, the banning of Ngor from the assembly, and finally, a parliamentary call to revive deliberations over three media bills originally drafted five years ago.