This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, focuses on the events of 28 September – when security forces killed at least 160 people in a crackdown on opposition to the military regime – and their implications for the stability of the country and the sub-region. It discusses dangerous fractures within the military and signs that various members are raising ethnic militias, warns that Guineans will not accept an attempt by the army to remain in power and calls for the end of military rule and a re-opening of the democratic transition process.

Some 260 Sudanese refugees jailed for entering Lebanon illegally have been deproted, according to a Sudanese Embassy official. The refugees were sent back on a Sudan Airways flight, the official said. In a statement to the Sudan News Agency, head of Sudan’s Expatriates Affairs Amin Taha al-Girain said 2,871 Sudanese nationals had also been voluntarily returned from Libya.

Supporters of the slain military leader of Burkina Faso, Captain Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara, have denounced international support for the regime of President Blaise Compaore saying it was doing all it can for him "to rule for ever". Commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of Captain Sankara in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, they gathered at the Daghnoen cemetery, a district in Ouagadougou, around the tombs of their idol and his companions who were assassinated on 15 October, 1987 during a coup.

The Congolese government's military operation in eastern Congo, Kimia II, backed by United Nations peacekeepers and aimed at neutralizing the threat from a Rwandan Hutu militia group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), has resulted in an unacceptable cost for the civilian population, said 84 humanitarian and human rights groups in the Congo Advocacy Coalition.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) sounded the alarm on the worsening humanitarian situation in the Horn of Africa today, noting that nearly five million children under the age of five in the region are now hungry. This marks an increase of 1 million since May, while the number of people in need of emergency assistance in the region has also risen, climbing from 20 million earlier this year to 24 million, the agency said.

Ballot papers and other electoral material will be given to provincial elections commissions on 18 October, which leaves just 9 days to distribute to polling stations before the vote. Two Mozambican companies are involved – Sotux is supplying voting booths and lamps and Académica is supplying the clear plastic ballot boxes. The rest of the material is coming from South African companies, Lithotech and Uniprint.

South African police have fired rubber bullets and tear gas at crowds of protesters angry at a lack of services and proper housing in their townships. Thousands of residents in two communities east of Johannesburg had barricaded roads and marched on public offices, setting one building alight.

Kenya’s search for oil will intensify with the drilling of oil at Boghal near Isiolo in the next two weeks. Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi said the government had signed 18 oil production sharing contracts in the last 18 months noting that they were at various stages of exploration. Speaking during the opening of the second South-South meeting on gas and oil management at Windsor Golf and Country Club in Nairobi, the minister said exploration had been stepped up in recent years. He said there were high hopes that the country could strike oil soon.

The tit-for-tat expulsion of thousands of Angolan refugees living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the repatriation of thousands of undocumented Congolese migrants working in Angola, is raising fears of a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the making. According to ANGOP, the Angolan state-run media outlet, the number of Angolans forcefully removed from the DRC since a large-scale repatriation operation kicked off in August 2009 had topped 23,000 by 13 October.

Authorities in the Republic of Congo have restricted the movements of several opposition politicians, who claim President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s July re-election was won through fraud. Electoral disputes in Congo have triggered violence in the past, most notably when a two-year civil war broke out in 1997 after a row between Sassou-Nguesso and former president Pascal Lissouba.

At least 29 people have died of cholera and hundreds more are being treated for cholera-related symptoms such as acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) in the larger Turkana District in the northwest and in the eastern regions of Garbatulla and Laisamis, say health officials. "Two people have died in Garbatulla, five in Laisamis, three in Turkana North, one in Turkana South and 18 in Turkana Central," said an official in Kenya's Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation.

Thousands of Congolese citizens are being deported from Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) under alarming circumstances, say humanitarian workers. "The deportees have nothing with them, everything was taken; there are cases of violence, rape and sexual abuse," said Severine Flores, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Three years ago, the Church of Scotland Hospital at Tugela Ferry, in the rural Umsinga area of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province, was the focus of international media attention as the epicentre of a deadly outbreak of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). It was reported that 52 of the 53 patients initially diagnosed died within a month of contracting this strain of TB, which is resistant to both of the first-line antibiotics used to treat the disease, as well as two classes of second-line drugs.

Ten years ago, a move to legalise abortion in Namibia failed. The number of unwanted pregnancies remains high, with many people unwilling or unable to use contraception. Despite the risks, illegal abortions remain common. Misoprostol - a drug used to control ulcers, more usually known by the brand name Cytotec - has become a favoured method for inducing abortion.

Taking practical measures to realize the rights of the child is the greatest gift that we can give to our future generations, said High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay as the Convention on the Rights of the Child turns 20 years old. A two-day commemoration is taking place in Geneva on 8 and 9 October to kick off some five weeks of activities world-wide ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Convention on 20 November.

Despite its six million inhabitants, Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is far from a city where one can live openly and express their sexual orientation. On this day everywhere in Africa, homosexuality is considered an abomination and a way of relating imported ideas from the West. Just walk the streets of this vast city to understand how difficult it is to receive a same-sex partner. Moreover, within the family, the pressure is often so strong that the paper of a homosexual is like an ordeal.

President Robert Mugabe has called for a new start to relations with those Western countries he has spent years insulting for their criticism of his leadership. "Our country remains in a positive stance to enter into fresh, friendly and co-operative relations with all those countries that have been hostile to us in the past," he said yesterday at the first sitting of parliament since a unity government was formed with the former opposition in February.

Four African states threatened late on Thursday to veto any accord in the Doha trade round that did not address their demands for a reduction of Western subsidies for cotton. The negotiations on the product, a mainstay of several African economies, are seen as a touchstone of efforts to create a fairer global trading system in the Doha round, where agreement is sought in 2010.

More than one-million babies are stillborn during labour every year – 98% in low- and middle-income countries - yet global policy discussions around these largely silent deaths are mostly nonexistent. On top of this another 904 000 babies die soon after birth due to birth complications, closely linked to almost half of the world’s 536 000 maternal deaths.

Elementary school teachers in Tunisia organised a one-day strike on Monday (October 5th) to show solidarity with the dozens of trade union activists and educators imprisoned for their involvement in protests in Gafsa last June. Four of the 34 people imprisoned for the strike in the southern mining region are members of the Elementary Education General Syndicate of Redeyef-Gafsa