Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram said Monday 13 February it killed 12 soldiers in an attack in the northeast town of Maiduguri but security forces denied any of its officers had been killed and said it shot dead sect members. Boko Haram, which wants Islamic law more widely applied, has killed more than 250 people this year in bomb and gun attacks on cities across the north of Africa's most populous nation.

Egyptian women are angry, again, at presidential hopeful Hazem Saleh Abu Ismail’s comments that as president he would require the veil, or higab, on all women in the country. Abu Ismail said that women in the country must 'change creed' and that Islam gives no special personal freedom.A group of young Cairo University students, who are forming a women’s alliance organization on campus, told Bikyamasr.com that 'this forcing of women to do this or that is not Egyptian'.

The workshop took place around three main conversations namely: peer learning from the 2011 experiences, learning on innovative strategies to employ in the future from various experts and developing a common plan for the next implementation phase. Various experts provoked conversations around various topics including building people’s power to engage governments (Firoze Manji/Pambazuka), campaigning using digital media for social advocacy (John Kipchumbah/Huduma), play for the union (Valerie Traore/NIYEL), moving from ratification to implementation (Alexandria Muhanji/SOAWR), monitoring and evaluation (Kimberley Bowman/Oxfam and Gavin Steadman/Pamoja), evidence based policy research (Marie LaBerge), how governments navigate policy through to implementation (Dr Michael Chege/Ministry of Finance, Government of Kenya) among others. Click on the link to read the full briefing.

The intensifying competition for commercial access to the world’s remaining deposits of oil, gas and minerals brings with it a serious risk of exacerbating corruption and violent conflict. A new Global Witness report shows that in Angola and Nigeria there is a risk that complex deals struck between governments and corporations for access to natural resources could be used corruptly to benefit vested interests in these countries, rather than the citizens. The report also points to major concerns over opaque sales of mining assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo to offshore companies.

The Goethe-Institut, in co-operation with the Cape Town Book Fair and APNET, is once again offering an invitation programme for publishers from sub-Saharan African countries. The aim of this initiative is to support the participation of publishing houses from sub-Saharan African countries at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012 and to provide training and networking opportunities for publishers from this region. The grant comprises of travel costs to Cape Town, participation in a workshop on 14 June 2012, a small stand at the Cape Town Book Fair (15 – 17 June 2012) and accommodation during the workshop and the Book Fair. Costs for the transportation of books and other materials to be exhibited are not covered.

Human Rights Watch has hailed Mali's plan to probe child labour in gold mines. 'Our research found that children in Mali start working as young as six years old. Many child laborers are denied an education or drop out of school. Some children come to the mines without their parents and suffer economic or sexual exploitation,' HRW said in a letter to the Minister of Mines, Amadou Cisse.

Nineteen people were killed in the country’s cholera outbreak last year. More than 300 people cases were reported, and an epidemic was declared on 30 September 2011. Though neighbouring countries, including Cameroon, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have experienced outbreaks over the past decade, the Central African Republic had not seen a cholera case in as many as a dozen years. Today, the cholera outbreak is finally on the decline.

This Amnesty International briefing shows that the governments whose exported military equipment have over the years turned up at the site of serious human rights violations in Darfur - including Belarus, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation - continue to supply those kinds of equipment to Sudan on a regular basis. The main ‘suite’ of arms used in Darfur by all parties to the conflict has been supplied to Sudan by this key group of state suppliers almost every year since the UN Security Council (UN SC) imposed an UN arms embargo on Darfur on 30 July 2004.

A Guinean court has filed charges against a top army officer over the killing of scores of protesters and mass rape of women during a 2009 demonstration against military rule, rights groups said. Colonel Moussa Tiegboro Camara, secretary of state in charge of fighting organised crime, is the highest-level official yet to be charged over the massacre, one of bloodiest events in the West African state's history.

The event entices filmmakers to enhance skills, develop collaborations and interface with the dynamic future of the film industry in Africa and the world.

Libya’s foreign minister says the interim government cannot stop Libyans from joining the Syrian uprising, as Tripoli takes the hardest line in the Arab world against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. On Thursday 8 February, Libya’s transitional government gave Syrian diplomats 72 hours to leave the country, just days after it handed the Syrian embassy in Tripoli to the opposition Syrian National Council – the first country to take this step.

Nigeria’s military has harassed and obstructed journalists trying to report on unrest in recent days, according to local journalists and news reports. On Sunday in the city of Jos, in Nigeria’s north central region, soldiers detained Jeremie Drieu, a videographer with French television station TF1, and local journalist Ahmad Salkida after they sought permission to film in the area, The Associated Press reported. The Nigerian federal government has been enforcing a state of emergency in Jos following bloody clashes between Muslims and Christians that have claimed the lives of at least two journalists, according to CPJ research.

The charcoal trade, referred to as 'black gold' by Kampala traders, has become more profitable than the forests where trees are being indiscriminately cut down for charcoal-burning. For the rural population, charcoal trade is an opportunity to earn an income. According to the National Forest Authority (NFA), more than 73,000 hectares of private forest are cleared every year across the country and over 7,000ha of protected forest reserves are destroyed annually for timber and charcoal.

The local authorities in Namacurra in Zambezia Province, Mozambique are appealing for urgent humanitarian assistance following the tropical cyclone Funso which hit the coastal areas of the province in the districts of Nicoadala, Pebane, Maganja da Costa, Namacurra, Quelimane and Chinde last month. Pedro Fazenda Sapange, the administrator for Namacurra district Red Cross, said that the slow response may lead to starvation and disease outbreaks. 'There is a serious need for food assistance, as most families lost their crops to the cyclone and floods. So far we have seen people prematurely harvesting their cassava which they normally harvest in June and July.'

South African recipients of money from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) have pleaded with the health minister to intervene as they continue to wait for overdue funds. Failure to do so will see several programmes closing and people losing their jobs. The groups, including Soul City and the Treatment Action Campaign, were due to receive payments from the Global Fund in July 2011 and January 2012 as part of Round 6. None have materialised.

It is time that the society at large recognised sex work as legitimate work: 'his body, his choice.'

Competing mobile operators MTN and Turkcell were silent this week on the latter's claims that MTN bribed its way into Iran six years ago. But circumstances surrounding MTN's audacious entry into Iran, and the South African government's concurrent diplomatic efforts there, provide a compelling context for the claims. MTN could also face increasing international pressure because the Iranian military owns one of MTN's two state-linked partners there, Iran Electronics Industries (IEI).

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has deployed its workers to assist some 20,000 people forced to flee fighting between government troops and rebel Tuareg groups in Mali. In a statement, made available to PANA in New York, it said that, 'most of those uprooted by the violence in the Azawad region of northern Mali that began in mid-January have fled to Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania'.

Solange Lusiku Nsimire is editor-in-chief and publisher of the independent newspaper Le Souverain in her hometown Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province in eastern Congo, one of the most troubled regions of the DRC. It is a small and crusading newspaper devoted to promotion of democracy and women in a country where abuses against democracy and against women are too often the norm. On 2 February Lusiku had been awarded a prestigious honorary doctorate degree at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), a tribute to her courage as a journalist and women's rights defender.

Côte d’Ivoire’s leprosy programme was consistently under-funded during the civil war (2002-2007) and last year’s political turmoil, say health practitioners, leading to a loss of expertise in terms of detecting or treating the disease. Not considered a public health priority, the government and donors de-prioritized the leprosy fight over the past decade, with funding dropping to 30 per cent of the original total, according to Alain de Kersabiec, Côte d’Ivoire and Benin representative for French NGO the Follereau Foundation (FRF), which helps treat existing and new leprosy patients around the country.