On 12 November 2010, over 150 people marched from the Angolan Embassy to the Home Office in London in protest at the death of Jimmy Mubenga during a deportation. Campaigners from the Angolan community first delivered a letter to the Angolan Embassy to call on the authorities to intervene. The march, led by the family and friends of Jimmy Mubenga, then marched to the Home Office. Although marchers had only been given permission to use the pavements, the sheer volume of people meant that very soon they took to the roads and were eventually given a police escort on a circuitous route to the Home Office.

The Moroccan government is stepping up efforts to check the rising maternal mortality rate in the country by implementing a variety of measures to help women who give birth without medical supervision, particularly in rural areas. Experts say about 132 deaths per 100,000 live births occur each year. At a meeting organised by Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP) - a Moroccan political party founded in 1975 – a number of factors were listed as the main causes of maternal mortality in the North African country.

Key African countries are allegedly planning to subvert a ban on sales of Zimbabwe’s controversial Chiadzwa diamonds, as a decision on the country’s trade future remains unclear. South Africa, Angola and Namibia are said to be preparing to pass off Zimbabwe’s diamonds as their own, in an effort to subvert the ban still in place by the trade watchdog, the Kimberly Process (KP). Sources quoted by the Standard newspaper revealed that the African countries, with the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), India and China are frustrated by the stalemate reached by the KP over whether to allow full exports of Chiadzwa diamonds.

The number of new HIV infections is almost one-fifth lower than it was a decade ago, indicating that the world has 'turned the corner in the fight against HIV/AIDS', according to the UNAIDS Global Report on HIV/AIDS. 'The biggest epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa - Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe - have either stabilised or are showing signs of decline,' according to the report.

As Haiti gears up for its forthcoming elections, Jean William Jeanty decries the complete absence of transparency in the country around post-earthquake reconstruction and the ability of foreign companies to usurp Haitian law. With the country gripped by cholera (the ‘natural indicator of underdevelopment’), Jeanty stresses that Haiti’s leaders ‘are trying to rush the elections so that they can perpetuate things the way they are’.

From football rows to images of love and affection, a variety of messages find embodiment on Tunisian walls. People of various ages and social classes dedicate effort and money to turn the walls of Tunis into a random mosaic of letters and figures, understandable only to their peers. 'I find a space where I can move around with my black lines, away from the eyes of censors, to write whatever I want,' said Semer Idoudi, a 20-year-old student.

The Security Council has renewed for another 12 months the authorisations granted to states and regional organisations cooperating with Somalia’s transitional government to fight piracy off the country’s coast. As set out in previous resolutions, this includes the authorisation for States and regional organisations to enter Somalia’s territorial waters and use 'all necessary means' - such as deploying naval vessels and military aircraft, as well as seizing and disposing of boats, vessels, arms and related equipment used for piracy.

The Autonomous Port of Pointe-Noire has evicted 8,000 residents of a fishing village to make way for expanded facilities. The move is a blow to the community’s livelihoods, as well as closing down the market that supplied the city’s poor with affordable protein. 'I have fished here since my youth, and I don’t know where we can go,' said Joseph Takpo, an elderly fisherman.

The International Development Law Organisation has carried out research to compile comprehensive, accurate and strategic information on how best to enhance the protection of girls through legal empowerment approaches in four target countries, Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Liberia. The research focused on: access to birth registration, access to education, access to property rights, protection from child labour, protection from trafficking, protection from commercial sexual exploitation and protection from underage marriage.

Land Value Capture is a public revenue policy recommended for national action by consensus of all UN member states in both the UN Habitat II Agenda in 1996 and The Vancouver Action Plan, the 1976 founding document for UN Habitat. Land value capture can provide a substantial and practical means to raise the revenue needed to implement Local Agenda 21 sustainable community plans, meet the Millennium Development Goals, and provide needed community services.

Questions have been raised about where the funding for the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone comes from. The tabloid received world publicity for its 'outing' campaign against lesbians and gays.It seems likely that the Rolling Stone’s campaign is designed to increase pressure on the Museveni government, facing a surprisingly strong opposition heading into upcoming elections, to move the Anti-Homosexuality Bill toward passage, says this article.

The death toll in Somalia's ongoing war has increased during the last two years, local human rights groups told AfricaNews. The increment comes as shelling and fighting between government forces backed by AU peacekeepers and rebels reaches high proportions in the capital Mogadishu. The emergency traffic ambulance service in Mogadishu said that at least 4,260 people were killed in Mogadishu during 2009 and 2010.

Sudan's north said on Wednesday the semi-autonomous south of the country had declared war by supporting anti-government rebels from Darfur, just weeks ahead of a referendum on southern independence. Sudan's north-south civil war ended in 2005 with a peace deal that shared wealth and power, enshrined democratic transformation and allowed southerners to vote in a 9 January plebiscite which most expect to result in secession.

A survey has found HIV infection rates as high as almost 40 per cent among farm workers in Mpumalanga and Limpopo. Almost 3,000 farm workers from 23 commercial farms in the Malelane, Musina and Tzaneen regions took part in the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) survey conducted over three months. At least 39,5 per cent of farm workers who donated blood anonymously were found to be HIV positive. This was more than twice the national prevalence rate of 18 per cent.

The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) has launched its annual global Call for Proposals for programmes that support country-level efforts to end violence against women and girls. The criteria, eligibility requirements and application guidelines are available at The deadline for application is 20 January 2011.

A randomised controlled trial has found that the HIV infection rate in HIV-negative gay men who were given a daily preventative pill containing two HIV drugs was reduced by 44 per cent, compared with men given a placebo. The efficacy in subjects who, by self-report and pill count, took the drugs more than 90 per cent of the time was 73 per cent. The other big finding of the iPrEx (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Initiative) trial was that while 93 per cent of trial subjects reported taking the pills correctly, on the basis of drug level monitoring in blood tests, only 51 per cent actually did so.

Born in Mogadishu, Siham and Iman Hashi are the first female Somali artists to sign a record deal with a major American label. After the civil war broke out in Somalia in the 1990s, the girls and their family moved to Canada as refugees. They are currently in Los Angeles recording their first album as 'Sweet Rush' with Universal Motown, while finding time to raise awareness about the continuing suffering in their homeland.

Less common but perhaps more useful than the tourist map is the ‘harassment map’ that many Cairo women are beginning to refer to. HarassMap, a private initiative run by volunteer activists, allows women who have been subject to harassment to report the incident anonymously by SMS, e-mail or online social networking sites. The information is compiled into a database that utilises open-source mapping technology to create a digital map of harassment 'hotspots' in Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

Laws and practices governing citizenship in too many African countries effectively leave hundreds of thousands of people without a nationality, says a new report. 'These stateless Africans are among the continent’s most vulnerable populations: they can neither vote nor stand for office; they cannot enrol their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government; they are exposed to human rights abuses. Statelessness exacerbates and underlies intercommunal, interethnic, and interracial tensions in many regions of the continent.' The report, 'Citizenship Law in Africa' was written by Bronwen Manby, of the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP) of the Open Society Foundations, based on a comparative analysis of the citizenship laws of 53 countries.

On the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) calls again the attention of the world to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), theatre of the most deadly conflict of the last 50 years and massively affected by rapes committed on a daily basis by belligerents. The women and men fighting against this scourge in turn become victims of criminals who act with total impunity.