Nobody seems to like the Land Tenure Security Bill, writes PLAAS Senior Researcher Ruth Hall. 'It has raised the ire of both of the constituencies whose interests it sets out to address: those who own commercial farms and those who live and work on them. Contrary to its name, the Land Tenure Security Bill appears to deal largely not with how to secure people’s land tenure, but rather how to manage their resettlement off farms.'

Italy's interior minister is to visit Tunis for talks aimed at stopping the flow of migrants to the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. More than 15,000 people, mainly Tunisians but including some Libyans and Moroccans, have arrived since January's uprising in Tunisia. The UN refugee agency says tensions are rising between migrants and the local population and there is 'chaos and disorganisation'.

Several organisations used Human Rights Day to voice their dissatisfaction with the eThekwini municipality, accusing it of violating human rights by failing to deliver services to needy communities. Hundreds marched to the Durban city hall, with some threatening to boycott the local government election on May 18. Representatives and supporters of Right2Know, shack dwellers’ organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement SA, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, ratepayers’ associations, the Durban Social Forum and KZN Subsistence Fishermen were among the marchers.

The African Virtual University (AVU) launched the interactive Open Education Resources portal OER@AVU in January this year. The portal can be accessed at and contains quality resources developed together with twelve universities in ten African countries.

The Libyan government should release all Libyan and foreign journalists detained because of their reporting and allow them to cover the crisis in Libya freely, Human Rights Watch has said. Since anti-government protests began in Libya on 15 February 2011, the government has harassed, detained, and beaten journalists trying to cover the story. A Libyan journalist and a Qatari cameraman have been killed by gunfire in unclear circumstances.

Armed with a few Kodak Zi8 cameras, 6 HTC Wildfire mobile phones, energy, expertise in training citizen journalists, Small World News is working to share stories from Libya with the larger world. Small World News is on the ground in Benghazi training Libyans to capture and tell video stories of events in this volatile region. Along the way, the team has also captured footage that no other main stream media outlet has been able to get.

Google has created a way for it’s users to continue chatting with friends via Gmail, even when they’re away from their computers. As a Gmail user, you can send SMSes to your friends for free, and when your friends reply, they will be charged the same as a regular SMS.

Communities in Ejere and Gonde, central Ethiopia, are storing their best seeds in local seed banks. These communities are taking steps to be independent of seed companies, and exercise full control over seeds that have taken generations to develop. Many of the world’s original wheat and barley varieties were cultivated in Ethiopia, largely by women farmers. In recent decades, Ethiopian farmers have begun to substitute their own varieties for 'modern' varieties developed with a focus on higher yields. With climate change and new fungal diseases such as UG99, farmers in Ethiopia are looking not only for yield but also for genetic diversity and adaptability. These are traits found in abundance in local traditional seed varieties.

The political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire is increasingly having a toll on the country's neighbours, with the spillover effects ranging from the political and social to the economic. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has already suggested that growth in the region would be affected this year if the stalemate persists. Many experts have also raised the alarm, saying that it is an example that must not be allowed to take root in West Africa.

The Tanzania government has failed to comply with requirements that would have made her a compliant member of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, EITI. For a country to qualify for EITI compliant membership, it must exercise transparency and accountability in revenues that accrue from its resources such as oil, gas and minerals.

The three-month campaign of organised violence by security forces under the control of Laurent Gbagbo and militias that support him gives every indication of amounting to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch has said. A new Human Rights Watch investigation in Abidjan indicates that the pro-Gbagbo forces are increasingly targeting immigrants from neighboring West African countries in their relentless attacks against real and perceived supporters of Alassane Ouattara, says Human Rights Watch.

A three-day international seminar on the theme 'The Global Crisis and Africa: Commodity Dependence and Structural Transformation' took place in Accra, Ghana’s capital last week. Forty scholars from Africa and other parts of the world participated in the meeting. Setting out the context and key issues for the meeting, Tetteh Hormeku, head of programmes at TWN-Africa, said the influence and impacts of the crisis in Africa were shaped largely by the nature of the continent’s systemic integration into the global economy as primary commodity export dependent economies.

The recorded number of people displaced within their country due to conflict or violence rose to 27.5 million in 2010, which is the highest in a decade, according to a report by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The report was launched by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy, and the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Elisabeth Rasmusson. 'Close to three million people in 20 countries across the world were newly displaced from conflict and violence during 2010, and large scale displacement continues,' Rasmusson said.

This blog post from Scarlett Lion is made up of pictures of some of the more than 40,000 Ivorian refugees who have fled post election violence and insecurity in Cote d’Ivoire. 'Liberians, who had been refugees in Ivory Coast just a couple of years earlier, are hosting many refugees in villages along the border and others are being relocated to camps by UNHCR.

South African police are becoming more brutal by the day, with civil cases against them pushing the contingent liability budget to a whopping R7.5 billion in the last financial year. The Sunday Tribune has revealed that the sharp spike in brutal action by the police has prompted the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) to investigate three times more severe assault cases last year than in 2001.

Reducing farmers' dependence on oil will be key to feeding the world's rapidly expanding population in the face of climate change and rising fuel prices, the United Nations' special rapporteur has said. In an interview to coincide with the release of his report on feeding the world in the 21st century, Olivier De Schutter said promoting natural production techniques is the only sustainable way to guard against future crises and stop food prices increasing in-line with oil.

The African Union's panel on Libya Sunday called for an 'immediate stop' to all attacks after the United States, France and Britain launched military action against Muammar Gaddafi's forces. The situation in Libya 'demands urgent action so that an African solution can be found to the very serious crisis which this sister nation is going through', said Mauritanian President Ould Abdel Aziz, who is one of the AU panel members.

The highest court of the land has ruled invalid the law enacted to disband the former elite crime-fighting unit, the Directorate of Special Operations (or 'the Scorpions'). The Court’s two main findings are that: first, the state is constitutionally bound to 'establish and maintain an independent body to combat corruption and organised crime'; and second, that the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation ('the Hawks') established after the disbanding of the Scorpions 'does not meet the constitutional requirement of adequate independence' and is 'insufficiently insulated from political influence in its structure and functioning'.

Forty per cent of South Africa’s 48 million people are poor, and more than half of poor people are female. Around 2.5 million households are still without any access to electricity while four million households do not use electricity for cooking. This could easily mean that 20 million people still rely on dirty, polluting fuels – most of whom are women. This is the background to an Earthlife Africa Jhb report entitled 'Second Class Citizens: Gender, energy and climate change in South Africa'.

The African Development Bank is reviewing its funding to North African countries to focus on projects that boost jobs and reduce poverty after popular revolts in Egypt and Tunisia forced the collapse of governments. 'Like all development partners in Tunisia, we were caught by surprise,' Donald Kaberuka, president of the bank, said. 'We are having now to recalibrate our policies for North Africa, to try and address the issues of poverty and social exclusion.'