Global food prices will remain high and volatile throughout this year and into next despite record food production. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) twice yearly Food Outlook analysis says rising demand will absorb most of the higher output. It says its index of food prices in May was at 232, only six points below February's record high of 237.

GA had looked forward to leaving Eritrea with her husband and living a better life in Israel, until they found themselves kidnapped for money by local Bedouins in Egypt’s Sinai desert. GA, who spoke to IRIN in the Israeli city of Jaffa, is just one of the hundreds of asylum-seekers trafficked by international gangs every month from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East, mainly through Sudan, ostensibly in search of better opportunities. However, say human rights groups, many of them end up in captivity. Bedouin tribes in Sinai, which borders Israel, often hold them until their relatives pay a ransom.

After months of squabbling that angered donors and jeopardised gains from Islamist militants, the rival leaders of Somalia's government have agreed to delay elections. Despite the row, pro-government forces have been gaining ground in Mogadishu. African Union troops have seized territory from the al-Qaeda linked group, al-Shabab. However, al-Shabab still controls much of southern and central areas of the country.

Ngwa Amos, who earns a living by taxiing people from town to town on his motorbike, is now a single father of four. His wife died in labour on a recent morning at the Bamenda General Hospital in northwestern Cameroon. The African Union, along with government and nongovernmental organisations, have pledged to reduce maternal deaths in this region, but Cameroon is moving further from that goal. Cameroon's maternal mortality rate was 550 deaths for every 100,000 births in 1990 – the reference year for the goals. Since then, the key figure has risen to 1,000 deaths, according to the latest UN statistics.

On 6 June 2010, Khaled Said, 28, was beaten by two plain-clothes police officers in an internet café in Egypt’s second city, Alexandria. He was then dragged out into the street where, eyewitnesses say, the beating continued until he died. Khaled Said quickly became a symbol for every victim of the security forces’ brutality. The first seeds of what would become the ‘25 January Revolution’ were sown in Alexandria on 6 June 2010. Despite the uprising, however, the trial for those accused of killing Khaled Said is still ongoing.

The majority of Tunisia's political parties have approved the postponement of the election date for the country's Constituent Assembly to 23 October, the official TAP press agency has reported. The new date was announced by Tunisian caretaker Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi, after the head of the independent election committee had suggested 16 October, ruling out the initial date of 24 July for logistic reasons.

On Wednesday, 30 March 2011, the Refugee Space Project reports that Mr Swedi Fataki Mutambala was arrested in Gasorwe Refugee Camp, Muyinga Province. According to refugees talked to over the phone, Swedi - leader of the Association for the Defense of Refugees (ADR) in Burundi - had been sick and gone to the camp administrator so that he could go to Bujumbura hospital for a medical check-up. The police had arrived and Swedi had been arrested. Refugees said they did not know the reason for the arrest, but a few months ago refugees had been complaining about the violation of their rights.

Egypt and Kingdom Holding Co., the company controlled by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have signed an agreement in Cairo over contested land in Toshka in southern Egypt. The signing ends a dispute over a 100,000-feddan (104,000- acre) piece of land that is part of the Toshka agricultural development project, which is intended to use water diverted from the Aswan High Dam reservoir to irrigate land in Egypt’s western desert. Kingdom’s original acquisition came under criticism after a revolution in Egypt that ended the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

This Human Rights Watch report documents the intensification of the eight-year conflict over the past six months. Since December 2010, a surge in government-led attacks on populated areas and a campaign of aerial bombing have killed and injured scores of civilians, destroyed property, and displaced more than 70,000 people, largely from ethnic Zaghawa and Fur communities linked to rebel groups.

Five years after the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) revised its laws against sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), these crimes continue to go unpunished because of judicial inaction and a legal culture at odds with the changes. The laws, ignored and misinterpreted, have left escalating numbers of sexual violence survivors unprotected, and perpetrators free to violate again. When the penal code was amended in 2006, it was intended to 'prevent and severely reprimand infractions relating to sexual violence and to ensure systematic support for the victims of these crimes,' according to the text. To this end, it included previously ignored sexual violations addressed in international humanitarian law, and toughened up sentencing for those who violated the vulnerable, including children, the disabled and subordinates.

A human rights campaigner from Madagascar was in the UK recently to demand that the Royal Bank of Scotland withdraw its financing of companies mining tar sands in her country. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has a long track record of financing companies operating in the Canadian tar sands, which are devastating the land and lives of First Nations people in Alberta. The bank has also financed French oil giant Total’s test mining of tar sands in Madagascar over the last three years. Total is expected to decide next month whether to go ahead with larger scale exploitation of tar sands in the country. If it does, the water supply of more than 120,000 people in one of Madagascar’s poorest areas could be disrupted and poisoned and its unique biodiversity severely threatened.

While this toolkit has been designed primarily for the local partners and activists of the VNC campaign, this can be a resource, too, for human rights activists who are keen to develop their
online activism and want to know where and how to start. The toolkit aims to impart the following skills:
- An understanding of why and how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can
be appropriated by women's rights and human rights groups in their advocacy skills
through their use of online tools, including networking and mobile tools for advocacy and
campaigning.
- The ability to develop an advocacy/communication strategy.
- Knowing what social neworking is and the various spaces and tools they could use in their
online activism.
- An understanding of online privacy and security issues relevant to building their online
activism.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues to commit crimes against humanity and carry out genocide against the residents of Darfur in defiance of the United Nations, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the Security Council. In 2005 the Council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC after a UN inquiry found serious violations of international human rights law. The ICC has since issued arrest warrants against Mr. Bashir on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, making him the first sitting head of State to be indicted by the court.

'When I was pregnant with my son I drank a lot – mostly on weekends,' says Marion Williams, a 45-year-old mother who lost two of her five children in childbirth. Williams lives in one of South Africa’s famous wine-growing areas in the Western Cape. She started drinking as a teenager and was taken out of school, she suspects, to work to buy wine for her parents. 'It is estimated that at least one million people in this country have fetal alcohol syndrome and approximately five million have partial fetal alcohol syndrome and [other] fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. It’s tragic because it’s completely preventable,' says researcher and human geneticist Denis Viljoen in Cape Town, the provincial capital of South Africa’s Western Cape.

The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has applauded President Goodluck Jonathan, of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, for signing into law the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill. 'The objective of the act is to make public records and information more freely available and to also protect public records and information to the extent that they are consistent with the public interest and the protection of personal privacy,' according to a statement from the presidency.

Two witnesses were taken to task by the truth commission over their contradicting and inconsistent testimonies on the 1984 Wagalla massacre, reports the Daily Nation. Former Finance minister David Mwiraria maintained that a visit by the Kenya Intelligence Committee to Wajir a day before the killings was purely to assess development projects. But on closer scrutiny, he admitted that the trip was sanctioned to resolve the Shifta movement in north eastern Province.

Parties to the conflict in Western Sahara continued to deepen their discussions on the electoral mechanisms for self-determination during three days of United Nations-backed informal talks in New York, according to a communiqué issued at the end of the meeting. By the end of the talks, however, 'each party continued to reject the proposal of the other as a sole basis for future negotiations,' said the communiqué, reached after the meeting in Long Island, New York, that was convened by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Western Sahara, Christopher Ross.

Around the world, street papers have been welcoming people who felt too insecure to stay in their home lands. Whether or not they have official refugee status in their newly adopted countries, what these vendors often have in common is the fear of returning to where they came from. Coming to a new country might save people from a potentially dangerous situation but it is not, by any means, a magical solution for all problems.

Liberian officials at Bahn refugee camp - set up by the government and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) to shelter Ivoirians fleeing violence - prefer residents to play down their political affiliations, and discourage the wearing of partisan T-shirts or the holding of political meetings. But late on a Saturday afternoon, with little to do and much to discuss, Ivoirian refugees talked with anger and concern about their future, while ruefully reviewing the events of the past six months in their country just across the border. 'I don't want to be here, but what choice does a refugee have?' asked Sandigui Lacinje Traoré, who previously worked for the Ivoirian state media in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire’s administrative capital. 'The war is not over yet as far as I am concerned,' Traoré told IRIN.

The homes of 12 Tafelsig backyarder families were demolished by the city’s Anti-Land Invasion unit recently, in a fierce face-off that left several people injured, including a woman who was seven months pregnant. This came two days after the Cape High Court granted a postponement to allow backyarders sufficient time to get legal representation to appeal the city’s application for an eviction order.