Namibia is set to develop its rich uranium resources and intends to pursue uranium enrichment locally. It also plans to build its own nuclear electricity plant. Nuclear energy experts from Finland’s Nuclear and Radiation Authority are currently helping the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) to draft Namibia’s first ever nuclear policy, which is to be completed mid-2011, together with relevant laws. Namibia plans to generate electricity from its own nuclear reactor by 2018.

Unrest following Côte d'Ivoire's presidential election is blocking a nationwide vaccination drive against yellow fever, a fatal mosquito-borne disease that is affecting people throughout the country. In the past month 11 people have died in the centre-north departments of Séguéla, Katiola, and Béoumi; two cases of yellow fever have been confirmed and there are a further 21 suspected cases in those departments and in nearby Mankono, according to local health workers and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Forced Migration Current Awareness Blog is a current awareness service highlighting web research and information relating to refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and other forced migrants. Visit the website for analysis and commentary related to this field.

Angola has denied that mercenaries from the country were operating in Ivory Coast, following reports that defiant strongman Laurent Gbagbo's camp had recruited hired guns from Angola and Liberia. The statement came after the United Nations' top peacekeeper, Alain Le Roy, said last week the UN had confirmed that Gbagbo forces were working with foreign mercenaries in their bid to gain the upper hand in the political stand-off between Gbagbo and presidential rival Alassane Ouattara.

The Uganda government is seeking $1 million under a supplementary budget request to parliament to facilitate a meeting with Congolese officials and lawyers – whose country accuses Uganda of war crimes and plunder of its resources. The meeting is slated for later this month in Kampala. DR Congo accuses Uganda of war crimes and plundering its resources when the latter, together with a bevy of regional countries, invaded it between 1998 and 2003. In 1999, Congo took Uganda to the World Court - seeking reparations of between of $6b and $10b - which the court said was a fair claim. The UN court sitting at The Hague, however, gave the countries an option of settling the matter between themselves.

A French judge placed Rwanda's defence minister and five other aides of President Paul Kagame under investigation in a probe into an attack seen as sparking the African country's 1994 genocide, legal sources said on 16 December. Placing the men under investigation means that international arrest warrants issued for them - which led to Rwanda cutting off diplomatic relations with France in 2006 - can be dropped, reports The Independent.

Makerere University is considering altering its government sponsorship admission criteria to ensure that reasonable numbers of both girls and boys are admitted to each course. The new measures are expected to be in place before Makerere’s admissions in August. They may impose an admission ratio of 60:40 for government sponsorship in humanities (arts) and a 70:30 ratio for science courses, in favour of the less-represented sex in each academic discipline.

Tanzania's umbrella labour union is planning a nationwide peaceful demonstrations to protest the government's decision to hike power tariffs by 18.5 per cent effective 1 January 2011, the body's leadership said. 'As workers we are not convinced with the way the government and the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) decided to increase power tariffs while aware that most of our people are leading miserable lives,' said Nicholas Mgaya, acting secretary general of the Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA).

France's highest court has upheld an order to extradite Rwandan rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana to face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). A lawyer for Mbarushimana said the court had rejected his client's appeal against extradition. Mbarushimana is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, allegedly committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year.

The head of Egypt's Coptic Church appealed for calm as protesters clashed with police for a third day last week after a New Year's Day blast killed 23 churchgoers. Pope Shenouda III also called on Egypt's government to address Christian concerns about discrimination. Late on Monday, protesters again clashed with riot police in Cairo, demanding protection and justice.

Medical experts have warned that malaria and HIV have monopolised interventions geared towards curbing child mortality in Kenya, thus ignoring the equally deadly killer, diarrhoea. This disease has silently claimed the lives of hundreds of children every year. Cecilia Njambi, a mother of two, lost her first-born son to diarrhoea. 'He hadn’t slept well the previous night and had complained that his tummy hurt. His stool was loose but we weren’t alarmed as no one takes diarrhoea seriously anyway. We just assumed that he must have eaten something that didn’t go down well with him.'

Writing from Haiti, Sokari Ekine describes the problem of unsanitary conditions, the randomness of the destruction caused by last year’s earthquake, the wounds of people who survived and the possibility of a third revolution to come.

This report from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) says the analysis of the current context in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) makes obvious the existing persistence gender imbalance in all the domains of economical, social, cultural and political development. Access of women to decision making tables, as well as to national economical resources and production factors remains very limited. The situation has deteriorated in latter years with the negative effects of wars in repetition, to the current persistent insecurity. In fact, 61.2 per cent of Congolese women live underneath the poverty threshold. Furthermore, in the DRC, the situation of gender-based violence; particularly domestic violence on women and young girls is very worrying. Collected national data on various forms of Violence Against Women (VAW) demonstrates how it strongly correlates with under-development (human, economic, social and infrastructure).

Supporters of Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo have vowed to fight to the death to keep him as president of the world's top cocoa producer as pressure grows for him to quit after a disputed election or face sanctions. His rival Alassane Ouattara has won almost unanimous international backing after his eight-point lead in a 28 November presidential vote was overturned on grounds of alleged fraud by the Constitutional Council, led by a staunch Gbagbo ally.

With mounting unemployment spurring discrimination and the politics of polarisation on the rise, United Nations officials have decried the human rights violations, xenophobia, and exploitation faced by many of the world's 214 million international migrants. 'It is important to recall, particularly in these turbulent times, the fundamental role that migrants play in strengthening the global economy,' Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message marking International Migrants Day, calling on the very many States that have yet to do so to ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families.

'Control and Sexuality' by Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Vanja Hamzi? examines zina laws in some Muslim contexts and communities in order to explore connections between the criminalisation of sexuality, gender-based violence and women’s rights activism. It is hoped that the publication will help activists, policy-makers, researchers and other civil society actors acquire a better understanding of how culture and/or religion are invoked to justify laws that criminalise women’s sexuality and subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading forms of punishment.

Amnesty International has welcomed a Zimbabwe court's decision to acquit a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights activist charged with possession of pornographic materials.Ellen Chademana, an administrative assistant at the prominent NGO Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), was acquitted by a magistrate's court in Harare. The charges followed an armed police raid on the GALZ offices in Milton Park Harare in May.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been accused of siphoning off up to $9bn (£5.6bn; 7bn euros) of his country's funds by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Luis Moreno Ocampo told the BBC that President Bashir had hidden the money in personal accounts outside Sudan. Mr Ocampo's suspicions originally came to light when a diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks was published by the Guardian newspaper. Sudan has forcefully denied the claims.

Reports sent to Greenpeace indicate that more than 200,000 cubic litres of radioactive sludge from three cracked waste pools have been leaking into the environment at the SOMAIR uranium mine in Niger since 11 December 11, says Greenpeace. 'This new leakage shows that the bad practices at the AREVA uranium mines in Niger continue to threaten the health and safety of people and the environment,' said Rianne Teule, energy campaigner for Greenpeace Africa.

Reactions to the diplomatic cables released by the whistleblower website Wikileaks continue to flourish all over the blogosphere. Revelations concerning the conflict over Western Sahara have sparked a few comments. Ali Amar is a Moroccan journalist. Writing on VoxMaroc [Fr], a blog hosted by the French daily Le Monde, he underlines the fact that although the leaked cables revealed American diplomats' reservations about bad governance and corruption in Morocco, they showed unwavering American support for the kingdom's position on Western Sahara.