Entries for the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist Award Africa are now open. The competition, which is made possible through funding support from the Government of the United States of America, is open to African journalists between 25 and 35 years old, working for African news and media organisations.

A judge has temporarily ordered a tabloid in Uganda to stop publishing lists identifying people it claims are gay after an advocacy organisation filed a lawsuit. The order came a day after Rolling Stone - which has no relation to the iconic US music magazine - published a list of people it said were gay, urging readers to report them to police. Last month the tabloid published names, photos and address of 100 people that it called the country’s top gays and lesbians, alongside a yellow banner reading, 'hang them'.

Since the workers from Vale, Brazil’s giant mining company, started to drink at his bar, fortune has favoured Mario Sálimo. With business growing week by week, the 47-year-old has opened extra rooms, added a restaurant and installed a dance floor. At weekends Mario’s Bar, near the clogged and dusty centre of Tete, is open until five or six o’clock in the morning. And the bar is not the only thing booming in this remote Mozambican town, which grew up as a trading post on the Zambezi river. Tete sits directly above one of the world’s largest reserves of high-quality coal.

The Harvard Africa Policy Journal is the leading scholarly journal in the United States dedicated to African policy. A call for papers has been issued for this year's theme, 'From the Heart of Africa'.

UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake joined the Kenya Government and other partners on Friday to roll out an innovative approach to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to their babies (PMTCT). The initiative includes a combination of interventions and supplies such as a 'Mother-Baby-Pack' of antiretroviral drugs and antibiotics, which women can easily administer at home. Without treatment, around half of all children born with HIV will die before their second birthday.

Morocco exercises secret detention and ill-treatment of detainees under counter-terrorism laws, Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleged in a provocative new report titled 'Stop looking for your son: Illegal detentions under the counterterrorism law in Morocco'. 'While Morocco has demonstrated the political will to adopt enlightened human rights legislation, it lacks the political will to enforce it when it comes to terrorism suspects,' said Leah Whitson, head of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division.

A parliamentary select committee has begun compiling comments on a new constitution, gathered at 4,000 meetings held across Zimbabwe over the past three months. Gender activists are confident that women's views have been expressed; it will be up to the eventual drafters of the new constitution to ensure they are reflected. Over 700,000 people attended public meetings on Zimbabwe's draft constitution.

As Egypt assumed its year-long chairmanship of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees executive committee in Geneva last month, its policy of shooting unarmed migrants along its 'death zone' border with Israel has come into stark relief. Last week a Sudanese man was shot and killed by Egyptian security guards as he attempted to sneak through a portion of the 160-mile barbed wire fence running through the barren Sinai desert. At least 25 African migrants have been killed this year alone, adding to the scores since 2007.

'The Civil Society Conference held on 27-28 October 2010 will hopefully come to be seen as a historic turning point in South Africa. It may mark the revival of co-ordinated community based activism that aims to achieve social justice and better the lives of the poor in South Africa. It was attended by more than 50 independent organisations that believe in social justice and that fight for it every day. Civil society is therefore taken aback by attacks on the motives of the conference emanating from the ANC’s National Working Committee (NWC) on 1 November 2010. We are surprised by the insinuations that the conference is part of a plot against the ANC. We expect better of the post-Polokwane ANC. This is conduct reminiscent of the paranoia of the Mbeki era. It is a conduct that suggests the ANC, or some of the people who hide under its flag, have something to fear.'

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights organisations and activists have expressed concerns over the the Sexual Practices Against Nature Bill presented before the national parliament of the Democratic Republic of aiming to criminalise homosexuality and zoophilia as sexual practices against nature. Jean Bedel Kaniki, President of Groupe Hirondelles Bukavu, an LGBTI organisation in the DRC confirmed that on the 22 October 'the bill was judged admissible by the majority of the parliament and was sent to the socio-cultural committee that will discuss its permissibility in terms of the provisions and principles of the constitution before its promulgation'.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's call for the Cape Town Opera not to perform in Tel Aviv should be listened to, write members of the Gaza community. 'Do the Cape Town Opera members completely ignore the fact that instead of showing solidarity with us the voiceless and imprisoned, they will instead be performing to war-makers and Israeli soldiers and reservists?'

Projections of the impact of circumcision on the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa based on clinical trials may underestimate the number of infections that can be averted by around 40 per cent, according to an international group of epidemiological modellers. The findings, published in advance online by the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, come from new epidemiological modelling work that incorporates findings from a pooled analysis of two recent studies that evaluated the impact of circumcision on HIV transmission from men to women.

South Africa is set to create a US-style development aid agency as it seeks to play a more prominent role as a major donor country in Africa, says International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane. She made the announcement at a regional heads of mission conference in Nairobi, Kenya during a three-day foreign policy session, Business Day reported on Wednesday.

Reporters Without Borders has written to Angolan interior minister Sebastiao José Antonio Martins voicing concern about the recent wave of threats and violence against journalists. One has been murdered, two have been physically attacked and injured, and a fourth has been the target of intimidation. 'We are concerned by the fact that the victims all work for critical or opposition news media,' Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said in the letter, sent on 28 October. 'The level of violence is very disturbing. The physical safety of journalists is in danger. We are alarmed by the gravity of these attacks.'

The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance (WGEID) has adopted two new General Comments on the crime of enforced disappearance. Phil ya Nangoloh, the Executive Director of NAMRIGHTS, states that in Namibia this effectively means, for example, that the perpetrators of the enforced disappearances of thousands of Namibians should be held responsible for the said disappearances starting before June 25 2002 when Namibia ratified the Rome Statute (RS) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and continuing after such ratification.

The Electoral Institute for the Sustainability of Democracy in Africa (EISA) deployed a observer mission to the Zanzibar General Elections of 31 October 2010 and has issued preliminary findings and recommendations. The mission noted that there has been a significant improvement in levels of political tolerance since the last elections held in Zanzibar in 2005. The agreement between President Amane Abeid Karume, leader of Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) in Zanzibar and Seif Sharif Hamad, leader of Civic United Front (CUF) contributed significantly to this observable change in political tolerance.

The Home Affairs office in Cape Town is facing a court interdict for refusing to renew asylum seeker permits and refugee status documents for foreign nationals who originally obtained their documentation in another province. As many of these foreign nationals whose documentation has expired cannot afford to travel back to the province where they originally received documents, they face the possibility of arrest and deportation, or, if they have a job, may lose it.

Nine days after the general elections in Tanzania a panel of experts will discuss the scene on the ground leading up to the elections, the election process itself and the what next for Tanzania.

For more than a decade, a host of young footballers, overwhelmingly under the age of 18 (more than 3,000 since 2000), have left the African continent to try their luck in Europe and Asia, according to the website of Association foot solidaire, a non-governmental organisation based in Paris, which fights against mistreatment of young African footballers. The mafia-type characters who extract money from parents, most of them poor, take young Africans to Asia or Europe with the promise of a trial at a big club. In the end, many of them are abandoned in the street, with no means to support themselves.