Following the election victory last week of Michael Sata, an outspoken critic of Chinese labour abuses in Zambia’s mining industry, Christian Science Monitor reports that one Chinese mine has given employees a sudden 85 per cent pay raise. It appears that the company prepared two different sets of paychecks, to be issued according to the election results.

The INTERIGHTS Quarterly Update is a regular email containing summaries of recent news, including updates on litigation, events and publications.

Rights groups in Guinea have denounced the action of security forces against the inhabitants of a village more than one hundred kilometers south of the capital, Conakry. Lawyers Without Borders and the Equal Rights for All say they are disappointed with the government over the alleged attacks by gendarmes and army troops against inhabitants of the Saoro village over a land dispute with the Soguipah Company. The land conflict started in 2003 following a presidential decree allocating 2,000 hectares of land in Saoro village to the Company.

Over six million Moroccan children set off to schools a few days ago. This year, the beginning of the school term was accompanied with lively debates over the future of the kingdom's state education system. Moroccans have voiced little confidence in state education and are critical of both teachers and the government's strategy in this sector.

International justice advocates are worried that donors will deprive the International Criminal Court (ICC) of sufficient funding next year, hindering the court’s ability to fulfil an expanding mandate that will stretch from Kenya to Libya and potentially Ivory Coast. In late July, the court proposed a 2012 budget of 159.45 million dollars, an increase of 13.6 percent over 2011. Even before the proposal was submitted, however, key donors were issuing calls for zero growth in the court’s budget.

Four years after the Great Recession, a catastrophe has been avoided, but few real lessons have been drawn and nothing has been fixed, says this report from the International Labour Organisation. 'Indeed, in many cases the crisis is being used as another opportunity to subordinate individual workers, governments and entire societies to the sway of unaccountable global capital markets. After a short revival of corporatist social dialogue in some countries, more workers are being pushed into precarious employment, and austerity packages are making working people, their families and pensioners pay for the crisis.'

A French appeals court has ruled against extraditing the wife of Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's former president, home to stand trial in connection with the African nation's 1994 genocide. Agathe Habyarimana has been wanted in Kigali by the Rwandan state prosecutor since 2009 on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for her alleged role in the Rwandan genocide. The massacre was sparked by the death of her husband, whose plane was shot down in the same year.

A purported spokesman for a Nigerian Islamist sect blamed for scores of attacks, including last month's bombing of UN headquarters, has rejected a proposal to negotiate with the government. A spokesman for Boko Haram told journalists in a conference call in the northeastern city of Maiduguri, where the sect has carried out most of its attacks, that the group would push ahead with its violent campaign.

Tanzania has said should the world experience a second economic downturn, the impact on East African Community (EAC) countries would be more telling as the economies of the five partner states were more interconnected than never before. The Minister for Finance, Mr Mustafa Mkulo told a sideline session of the 2011 IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington DC that shocks for Africa, especially the EAC members from a new economic downturn would be worse than in last crisis. He recalled that three years ago Africa was hit hard by the global economic crisis as exports dropped and financial flows declined.

Even before the Arab Spring had shown the power of the internet to accelerate the free flow of news and views and to bring like-minded citizens together to mobilize for change, authoritarian regimes had introduced extensive controls over digital media. Authoritarian regimes had built pervasive, multilayered systems for online censorship and surveillance. These systems have grown more diverse and sophisticated in the past two years, as documented in Freedom House's 2011 'Freedom on the Net' report and elsewhere.

If you would like to write a tribute or read and share tributes to Wangari Maathai, this site was setup by the Greenbelt Movement in her honour.

Global production of biofuels increased 17 per cent in 2010 to reach an all-time high of 105 billion liters, up from 90 billion litres in 2009. High oil prices, a global economic rebound, and new laws and mandates in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, and the United States, among other countries, are contributing to the surge in production, according to research conducted by the Worldwatch Institute’s Climate and Energy Program for the website Vital Signs Online.

Pregnant women and girls in Sierra Leone continue to face serious challenges in accessing drugs and medical care that are crucial to ensure safe pregnancy and childbirth, says this Amnesty International report. 'Over the last two years the Government of Sierra Leone has introduced various initiatives to address these challenges, including some welcome steps to increase women's access to health services and reform of the health workforce. In April 2010 the government launched a major initiative to provide free care to pregnant women and girls. However, much remains to be done.'

Reporters Without Borders has registered at least eight serious press freedom violations ranging from arbitrary arrest to shooting attacks on journalists in the past two months in the semi-autonomous northeastern region of Puntland and the breakaway northwestern territory of Somaliland. In most of these cases, there has been no investigation and no one has been punished.

A Cairo court has sentenced the former information minister to seven years behind bars and the former head of state TV to five years on corruption charges. Judge Abdallah Abul Hashem ordered ex-information minister Anas al-Fikki jailed for seven years 'for squandering public money'. Osama el-Sheikh, head of the Egyptian Television and Radio Union, was sentenced to five years on similar charges in a case involving the purchase of soap operas at inflated prices.

There was total compliance 26 September to the one-week nationwide warning strike by Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, disrupting examinations in the nation's premier university, University of Ibadan, University of Jos and paralysing academic activities in others. The warning strike is in protest against Federal Government's alleged refusal to implement the 2009 FGN/ASUU agreement which will be due for re-negotiation in six months. The agreement, among others include 26 per cent funding of education, wage improvement and upward review of retirement age of professors from 65 to 70 years.

Zimbabwe's political crisis continues. Yet with the stabilisation of the currency and the overhaul of some key economic policies, the agricultural economy in particular has begun to recover. IDS research has been tracking what has been happening in one province since 2000, looking at the changing livelihood prospects of those who gained land in Zimbabwe’s controversial 'fast track' land reform programme. A series of short films have been released which provide insights into what is happening on the ground, by offering some voices from the field. Following an overview film, each of the films in the series provides a profile of a particular farm family, exploring how they have invested in the land and their visions for the future.

The Conference of Energy Ministers in Africa – a two-year old institution recognised by the African Union and donors as the official voice of Africa's energy future – recently met for the second time and released a new declaration that can fairly be called double-speak, according to International Rivers.'The first half of the declaration is so great, it could have been written by a Nelson Mandela of energy. It outlines the brutal reality of Africa's energy poverty and the goals for universal access to sustainable energy across Africa by 2030. So why are the energy ministers calling for projects set to benefit one of the world's wealthiest corporations rather than the continent's own citizens? At the top of the plan's $19 billion list of 14 “Priority Projects” is Inga 3, a hydropower mega-project that would power a massive aluminum smelter to be built by BHP Billiton.'

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reached an all-time high in 2010, rising 45 per cent in the past 20 years. Rising rapidly between 1990 and 2010, global atmospheric CO2 levels totaled 33 billion metric tons last year, according to a report published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Global CO2 emissions fell one per cent in 2009, during the Great Recession, but rose at an unprecedented five per cent rate in 2010.

For the third time in five years the Nigerian parliament is considering a law seeking to prohibit same sex marriage after a new bill was presented to the House. The Nigeria government has been seeking to further criminalise same-sex relations in Nigeria through the prohibition of same-sex marriage since 2006.