This video recording of two speeches by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein, made to Harvard Law School students, details the constitutional violations of successive US presidents in perpetrating war, with the speakers arguing that this has essentially resulted in an authoritarian and expanded security state. Violations include assassinations, indefinite detentions, war crimes, secret courts, immunity from judiciary review, monitoring of citizens and extraordinary renditions.

Findings of a recent survey do not provide evidence for mass-immigration of foreign sex workers advertising online and in local newspapers, nor a spike in sex work or risk of HIV transmission during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. 'Public health programmes focusing on sex work and HIV prevention during international sporting events should be based on evidence, not media-driven sensationalism that further heightens discrimination against sex workers and increases their vulnerability.'

Nigeria has set aside $5 million for diaspora activities and prescribed a stipend of $2,500 to be paid to any member of its experts based abroad who decides to return home in a bid to turn 'brain drain into brain gain’. All over Africa, reports Africa Review, there are already similar attempts. In Kenya, a Draft Sessional Paper on the Diaspora was already being circulated and a web site was in place to identify the skills and expertise of citizens operating abroad.

Hundreds of people have been displaced and six killed in a fresh wave of ethnic clashes in the central Kenyan region of Isiolo where a spate of attacks and counter-attacks since late 2011 have left dozens dead. In the first attack on 13 February in Gambella, near Isiolo town [but in neighbouring Meru County], three farmers were killed on their farms 'as they harvested tomatoes'; three more were killed on [14 February] at Kampi ya juu, Isaiah Nakoru, the provincial commissioner told IRIN.

reports on the history of the unmanned drone in US assassinations. 'It was ten years ago this month, on February 4, 2002, that the CIA first used an unmanned Predator drone in a targeted killing. The strike was in Paktia province in Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. The intended target was Osama bin Laden, or at least someone in the CIA had thought so. Donald Rumsfeld later explained, using the passive voice of government: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” The Pentagon media pool began asking questions, and so the long decade of the drone began.'

According to the Tanzania government, the three-day floods that hit Dar es Salaam from 20-23 December claimed 39 lives. However, the figure is disputed by eyewitnesses who are putting the death toll to over 100. The floods have left numerous questions over the government’s ability to deal with, among others, natural and other disasters. While the government treated the problem as a natural disaster, there is massive evidence that the floods could have been avoided if successive Tanzanian governments had played their part effectively.

Burkina Faso's Network for Access to Essential Medicines (RAME) has called on the Burkinabè government to increase the budget allocation to the health sector to avoid interruptions to AIDS treatment. Despite an emergency plan announced in January, which will see the government spend around one billion CFA francs - two million dollars - to procure AIDS drugs in this West African country, patients and civil society groups are demanding permanent measures to ensure the availability of anti- retrovirals and reagents.

A raft of women's rights organisations and individuals have taken the executive director of Human Rights Watch to task for his introduction to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012.

A post on the Free Gender blog explains how in a meeting between LGBTI activists and church leaders, their sexuality was referred to as 'a thing'. 'Some left the boardroom with so many unanswered questions as they felt that conversation had a lot to do with dictatorship instead of opening up a holy and safe space for proper discussion that will make LGBTI feel welcomed at churches regardless of one’s sexuality or gender expression.'

Zimbabwe has suspended 29 NGOs in what has been described as a renewed clampdown on aid workers ahead of elections President Robert Mugabe wants held this year. The veteran ruler’s Zanu-PF party, at its annual conference last December, tabled a report claiming that there were 2,500 NGOs operating in the country, and most of them were pushing a 'regime change agenda'.

At least 10 people have died after Cyclone Giovanna struck Madagascar but details of its impact on the regions which bore the brunt of the category-four tropical storm remain sketchy, as communications and electricity supplies have been cut. The cyclone made landfall in the early hours of 14 February south of the port town of Toamasina and then carved a path through heavily populated areas towards the capital, Antananarivo, reportedly uprooting trees, damaging infrastructure, causing landslides and flooding as it moved inland.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Eldoret North MP William Ruto exchanged angry words in Parliament recently over the implementation of the Constitution and the trial of the Ocampo Four at The Hague. Facing-off from opposite sides of the Chamber, the former political allies traded words on campaign propaganda and the reasons for the International Criminal Court taking two cases related to 2008 post election violence. Speaker Kenneth Marende was forced to intervene.

Armed militias operating across Libya commit widespread human rights abuses with impunity, fuelling insecurity and hindering the rebuilding of state institutions, warned Amnesty International in a new report released a year on from the start of the February 2011 uprising. The report 'Militias threaten hopes for new Libya', documents widespread and serious abuses, including war crimes, by a multitude of militias against suspected al-Gaddafi loyalists, with cases of people being unlawfully detained and tortured - sometimes to death.

The Institute of African Studies journal Nokoko, Volume 2, is available. It includes:
- Editorial Note: The Front Lines and the Margins of a Global Anti-Poverty Movement
Toby Moorsom
- Economics of Afro-Pessimism: The Economics of Perception in African Foreign Direct Investment
Victoria Schorr
- Beyond an Epistemology of Bread, Butter, Culture and Power: Mapping the African Feminist Movement
Sinmi Akin-Aina
- Designed Disempowerment and Hegemonic Benevolence: A critical analysis of individual behavior change HIV/AIDS prevention programming in Sub-Saharan Africa
Imara Ajani Rolston
- “Something Ironic Happened on the Way to the Black Revolution”: The Politics and Power of Definition and Identity Construction within the Historiography of the African Diaspora
Leslie Wells
- Indian Hair, the After-Temple-Life: Class, Gender and Race Representations of the African American Woman in the Human Hair Industry
W. R. Nadège Compaoré
- Two Cities: Guangzhou / Lagos
Wendy Thompson Taiwo

Topics linked to migration, such as remittances and brain drains, have attracted increasing attention in discussions of development. But such specific issues should be considered in the wider context of the goal of reducing the grossly unjust levels of inequality between nations. The brain drain of medical personnel, for example, cannot be solved simply by looking at migration flows, but by focusing on how to provide the human and financial resources needed for equitably assuring the right of health to all. The latest AfricaFocus Bulletin contains an excerpt on migration and development from a longer study by the AfricaFocus editor published in 2011 by the Nordic Africa Institute, 'African Migration, Global Inequalities, and Human Rights: Connecting the Dots.'

In November last year CODESERIA held its annual Gender Symposium in Cairo, Egypt on the theme 'Gender and the Media in Africa', opening up a much needed platform on which gender and media scholars could renew reflection on the multi-faceted connection between media and gender in Africa. This special issue of Africa Media Review seeks to continue the dialogue by examining how political and social transformations on the continent resulting from re-democratisation, neo-liberalism and globalisation are implicating the nature of the relationship between media and gender.

Libya has demanded Niger hand over one of Muammar Gaddafi's sons who is under house arrest in the neighbouring nation after he warned in a television interview that his homeland was facing a new uprising. Mohammed Hareizi, spokesman for the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC), said on Saturday that Niger must extradite Saadi Gaddafi and other ex-regime officials to 'preserve its relationship and interests' in Libya. Saadi Gaddafi and more than 30 other loyalists fled to Niger after Tripoli fell to rebels in September.

It is a topic more likely to be whispered about than discussed openly, but could Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi, now closing in on his 17th year as Prime Minister (after four earlier as President), be thinking of calling it a day? It is for many familiar with Ethiopian politics an almost unimaginable prospect, while skeptics will point out that Meles has repeatedly promised to step down. But early this month, senior officials of the ruling EPRDF party (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) hinted at a succession plan to replace its 56-year-old leader at the end of his current term in 2015.

22 February is the third anniversary of a raid on Radio Bana in central Asmara in which about 50 journalists were arrested. Most were released but at least 11 are still held and are in solitary confinement. Reporters Without Borders is continuing to campaign for them and other journalists who are imprisoned in Eritrea, some since September 2001.

The January 2011 revolution in Tunisia brought an end to Internet filtering and control of online content but old habits seem to be resurfacing and Reporters Without Borders urges the Tunisian courts not to take any decision that could lead to the restoration of filtering. A court order requiring the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block access to pornographic websites, upheld by a Tunis appeal court in August 2011, revived the debate about censorship. If the order is confirmed, the ATI will be forced to censor online content in accordance with a complaint brought by a group of lawyers calling for the blocking of pornographic content that poses a threat to minors and Muslim values.