Gertrude Hambira doesn’t look like someone who gets arrested regularly. Nor do the other women and men in suits who work with her at the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ), formed in the mid-1980s to protect farm laborers. But arrest, harassment and even torture have been regular occupational hazards for Gertrude—the General Secretary of GAPWUZ—and her staff for many years. Unfortunately, things have not gotten much better since the 2008 elections when President Mugabe refused to cede power to the democratically elected Morgan Tsvangirai, a former union leader himself.

Richard Pithouse weighs in on the news breaking this week that the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University in London is to be closed down on the grounds that their work 'made no "measurable" contribution to the University.'

The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) of the University of the Western Cape, Isandla Institute and Studies on Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII) with support from the Programme to Support Pro-Poor Policy Development (PSPPD) of the Office of the Presidency, and the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) form a partnership to host a three-day national conference on structural poverty to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa on 20 - 22 September 2010.

Security officials in Ghana are cracking down on migrant Fulani herdsmen, accusing them of rape, vandalism, destruction of farms and armed robbery, but conflict resolution specialists say the herdsmen are being manipulated and the government must abide by regional right-of-passage laws.

A new study of adult mortality tells the tale of HIV over decades and across borders and how treatment may have helped to rewrite the ending. Published in The Lancet’s 30 April early online edition, the study compares adult mortality between 1970 and 2010 in 187 countries.

A few days ago, 9000 workers at the Naga Hammadi aluminum factory in Upper Egypt staged a protest, demanding that the Egyptian government raise the minimum wage to LE1200, and calling for a withdrawal of confidence from their official trade union committee.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions says the controversial diamond mine in Chiadzwa, Manicaland Province, must be nationalised. ZCTU chairman Lovemore Matombo said no single individual or company should be allowed to exploit the diamonds now at the centre of a row between a British company which claims title and the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Company (ZMDC).

On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, Sokari Ekine reflects on the murders of three Nigerian journalists. She accuses the Nigerian press of colluding with government in its own oppression and presenting an illusion of the free press by failing to defend its own members.

Two out of three gay South African respondents to an online survey said that going online had helped them accept their sexual orientation and many admitted to coming out online before they did so offline. But the voices of transgender people rarely appear in studies and surveys.

Most NGOs and UN agencies in Niger agree that in 2010 humanitarian actors are better geared to respond to the food security crisis than they were in 2005, but some say there is a risk of repeating mistakes in information-sharing, planning appropriate responses, and raising funds more quickly. "There are similarities to 2005 that donors and the aid community must heed in order to avert a disaster in 2010," warned CARE, an NGO focusing on poverty eradication, in a communiqué on 26 April.

Schoolchildren in South Africa are having less sex, and those that are, are doing it more safely, the second National Youth Risk Behaviour Survey by the Medical Research Council (MRC) has found. Over 10,000 students in their last three years of high school participated in the survey, which showed "significant reductions" in risky sexual behaviour.

The gold rush in Eritrea has attracted many Western companies, among them Canada’s Nevsun Resources Ltd. and Sunridge Gold; Britain’s Andiamo Exploration and London Africa; and Australia’s South Boulder, Sub Sahara Resources, Chalice Gold Mines Ltd. and Gippsland Ltd. And this doesn’t tell all that there is to the involvement of Western companies, for there are many subcontracted companies rushing to get in too, such as AMEC of Canada doing engineering study and Capital Drilling and Geo Drilling of Australia and Boart Longey of Canada doing drilling.

Almost 200,000 fewer women die each year from pregnancy-related complications than previously thought, because new survey methodology and better maternal mortality data mean more accurate mortality estimates, says a global study by the US-based University of Washington. The most recent UN-funded assessment of worldwide maternal mortality estimated there were 535,900 deaths in 2005, while the new study put the number at 342,900 in 2008, after drawing on birth records, censuses, national surveys and interviews with next of kin and caretakers to determine causes of death.

A landslide in western Kenya after relentless heavy rains has killed 10 people and more may be buried in the mud, the Kenya Red Cross (KRC) said on Friday. KRC said the latest deaths took the number of people killed by floods and landslides in Kenya so far this year to 100. El Nino weather patterns across east Africa are blamed for the wild storms that have hit east Africa's biggest economy. A massive landslide in neighbouring Uganda killed scores of people in a remote village in March.

The leader of Southern Sudan's second largest party has told the BBC there was "massive rigging" in Sudan's recent landmark elections. Lam Akol, head of SPLM-Democratic Change, and the leaders of eight other southern parties have decided to challenge the result in the courts.

The Somali Journalist Rights Agency (SOJRA) concerns the desperate pleading for help from the prominent and well respected Somali journalist who is currently in exile in Athens, the capital of Greece. A journalist Mohamud Mohamed Hallane, who is well known in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and in lower Shabelle region contacted SOJRA on Thursday April 29th, 2010 and requested for help while he faced an unkind condition during his dash for freedom.

Against the backdrop of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's spring meetings this weekend, numerous groups have chimed in on the need for and direction of a new World Bank energy strategy. The bank's review of this strategy, according to which it makes decisions on loans to energy projects in developing countries, is ongoing and is due to be finalised early next year. For now, though, it remains under fire.

The top United Nations envoy to Somalia today appealed to members of the nation’s Parliament to put aside their infighting and to instead focus on meeting the population’s needs and bolstering security. “I am following, with great unease, the unhelpful debate about parliamentary issues now taking place in Mogadishu,” Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said in a press release.

Political tension in Masvingo’s Mwenezi district was said to be high, after a 15 year old schoolboy exacted his own revenge last week Sunday by killing the ZANU PF thug who murdered his father in 2008. An MDC official in the area told Newsreel that Nhamo Machacha was stabbed in the stomach by the fifteen year old, after a scuffle broke out at a church service.

South Africa's "willing-buyer willing-seller" land reform programme is not working and the government will introduce new ways to give more land to the black majority, President Jacob Zuma has said. After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa's government set a target of handing over 30 percent of commercial farmland to black people by 2014 as part of a plan to correct racial imbalances in land distribution caused by apartheid.