Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, a government minister in the West African county, used his position to siphon millions of dollars for his own personal use, authorities said in two civil forfeiture complaints filed in US District Court in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The complaints say Mangue's assets can be forfeited because he engaged in misappropriation and theft of public funds for his benefit. The US government is seeking to recover $70 million in stolen funds from Nguema.

Indian, Chinese and US companies are among many inking land-investment deals in Africa, including Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan, Mali, and Mozambique. According to a study by the US- based Oakland Institute, foreign investors bought or leased a land area in sub-Saharan Africa about the size of France in 2009 alone. On this episode of Al Jazeera's The Stream, a discussion takes place between
Indian author and media commentator Anand Giridharadas, the Oakland Institute’s Executive Director, Anuradha Mittal and Christine L. Adamow, Managing Director of Africa BioFuel, a US company invested in farmland in Kenya and Tanzania.

Two police officers have been sentenced to seven years in prison for the assault that led to the death of Khaled Said, the young man whose murder in Alexandria has fueled the Egyptian revolution. Netizens are angry at what they describe as a lenient sentence and a slap to the revolution and its scream for justice, reports Global Voices.

Democratic Republic of Congo’s National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) has released the official list of the presidential and legislative candidates. There are less than 40 days to election day in the Central Africa state in the poll set for 28 November. According to the list released by CENI chairman Daniel Mulundaongo, 11 candidates will be running for president while a whopping 18,500 candidates will be contesting for the 500 legislative seats.

Over 50 campaigners joined the family and friends of Jimmy Mubenga recently in a vigil on the first anniversary of his death. Mubenga died on 12 October 2010, after being restrained by private security guards from the company G4S on a BA flight at Heathrow airport during a deportation attempt to Angola. Jimmy's wife, five children and his wider family are still waiting, one year on, to see if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will charge the three officers involved.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned a campaign of intimidation against the private press which it says has seen the arrest of six journalists on alleged terrorism charges.

Lecturers at Chancellor College, the main constituent college of the University of Malawi, were meeting Tuesday to decide whether the directive and assurances given by President Bingu wa Mutharika met their conditions in the eight-month academic freedom stand-off. In a surprise statement by the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC), Mutharika said he was guaranteeing academic freedom within the conditions of service of the lecturers and ordered that four lecturers that were sacked at the peak of the wrangle be reinstated without any conditions.

The Federation of African Journalists (FAJ) has challenged the Gambian Government to speak out on the whereabouts of journalist Ebrima Manneh. FAJ President Omar Faruk Osman and his Vice-President Foster Dongozi took Gambia’s Justice minister Edward Gomez to task over his government’s silence regarding the whereabouts of the journalist who disappeared in 2006. In an interview on 10 October with The Daily News, a Gambian newspaper, Mr Gomez had said the missing journalist was alive, without disclosing where he was.

Japanese women have launched a petition to stop the government from exporting nuclear power plants and sending food from disaster areas contaminated with radioactive waste as aid to developing countries.

Tuberculosis is the main killer of people with HIV infection; drug-resistant strains continue to spread; and paediatric tuberculosis remains an area of neglect. In the past decade, the number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide has barely declined, and the number of deaths remains catastrophic: more than 4,500 per day for this largely treatable disease. As a Lancet editorial has pointed out, 'A status quo in tuberculosis control is unacceptable.'

It's couched in 60 pages of near-incomprehensible economic-speak, but a radical World Bank plan to set up a new way to lend money to developing countries is being called a potential disaster for indigenous peoples, the environment and human rights, reports the London Guardian. The proposal, called A New Instrument to Advance Development Effectiveness: Programme-for-Results Lending (P4R), would lend money according to results achieved by projects.

Health officials in Ghana say breast cancer is a growing problem compounded by untrained medical practitioners, a lack of equipment, and unhealthy, sometimes fatal, cultural beliefs. Historically, breast cancer has received scant attention in this West African country. International donors and institutions have been focused on communicable diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS. Despite the fact that, according to Ghana Health Services (GHS), non-communicable diseases are the leading causes of death.

The UN children's fund has denied that there has been a polio outbreak in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar. It said that its office in Madagascar had issued a statement last week that led to the mistaken belief there had been an outbreak of wild poliovirus. In fact the last such case was detected on the island in 1997, Unicef said.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has demanded an explanation from Malawi on why it failed to arrest and surrender Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he visited the country. Malawi has been given up to 11 November 2011 to clarify why it failed to act on the court’s request when the indicted leader visited the country for the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa) summit. The Registrar of the court had sent a letter to the Malawi Embassy in Brussels on 13 October, 2011 asking for its cooperation for the arrest and surrender of President Bashir in the event that the latter entered the southern African nation’s territory. The note was not answered.

We, the undersigned African social justice activists, working to advance societies that affirm peoples’ differences, choice and agency throughout Africa, express the following concerns about the use of aid conditionality as an incentive for increasing the protection of the rights of LGBTI people on the continent.

The Sudanese authorities are increasingly deporting Eritreans to their country without allowing them to claim asylum, Human Rights Watch said. On 17 October, Sudan handed over 300 Eritreans to the Eritrean military without screening them for refugee status, drawing public condemnation from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The World Bank has amplified its rhetoric on the importance of gender equality in the context of development in recent weeks by promoting its flagship World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development and launching its Think Equal social media campaign. Unfortunately, says this article in the London Guardian, for billions of poor women and girls worldwide, the bank's track record in promoting gender equality in its investments reflects an alarming gap between rhetoric and reality.

An AU expert with the South African Institute for International Affairs, Kathryn Sturman, says Col Gaddafi's death will have a profound effect on the AU. 'It's the end of an era for the AU. Libya was one of the big five [along with South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria] financial contributors of the organisation. It paid 15% [of its budget], and also the membership fees of countries in arrears, like Malawi,' Ms Sturman said.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir says his country gave military support to the Libyan rebels who overthrew Col Muammar Gaddafi. In a speech broadcast live on state television, Mr Bashir said the move was in response to Col Gaddafi's support for Sudanese rebels three years ago. President Bashir said the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a Darfuri rebel group, had attacked Khartoum three years ago using Libyan trucks, equipment, arms, ammunition and money.

The ‘reasons put forward by the Kenyan government for this operation are demonstrably false’, writers and intellectuals have said in statement arguing against the country’s military attack on Somalia, following the recent kidnapping of three foreigners, allegedly by Al-Shabaab.