The Human Rights and Business Country Risk Portal (based at the Danish Institute for Human Rights) will create the first freely available website where companies can access country-specific information on human rights risks alongside tools and advice for managing those risks.

The homosexual movement in Malawi was dealt a heavy blow at the weekend when President Bingu wa Mutharika condemned the act, describing it as foreign and un-African. President Mutharika made the scathing remarks during the consecration of a Roman Catholic Bishop at Limbe Cathedral in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial city.

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.

In preparations for the next elections Kenya has made changes to their voting systems, changing it from a paper based model to an electronic version. As of the 12th of April 2010 to the 21st may 2010, Kenya’s Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) will register voters electronically for the first time ever in 18 selected constituencies. The pilot will cover the 18 constituencies of Kamkunji, Langata, Mvita, Malindi, Dujis, Wajira East, Isiolo South, Imenti Central, Mbooni, Nyeri Town, Kikuyu, Eldoret North, Nakuru Town, Ainamoi, Ikolomani, Webuye, Kisumu Town West and Bonchari.

In a number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, widespread HIV infection has already translated into full-blown AIDS epidemics. The effects of this disaster on lives and livelihoods are dramatic, yet the economic consequences are difficult to measure using conventional approaches. Although past and current consequences of the epidemic, and responses to these, can be empirically studied, our knowledge of the overall socio-economic impact of HIVAIDS remains deficient. This study focuses on Malawi, as a representative case. It addresses both the short and long term impact of HIV/AIDS by bringing together and analysing findings from qualitative and quantitative studies on the spread and impact of the epidemic.

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.

Chad's government says the army has killed 105 insurgents and beaten back a new attack near the Sudan border, but the rebels have denied the claims. FPNR leader Adoum Yacoub said both sides had lost lives but did not give any details.

A Congolese man is trying to get a controversial Tintin book banned in the cartoon star's home country of Belgium. The ginger sleuth's "little (black) helper" in Tintin in the Congo is seen as "stupid and without qualities", Bienvenu Mbutu is quoted as saying. "It makes people think that blacks have not evolved," said Mr Mbutu, who lives in Belgium.

In many African countries, prison conditions are awful, and have been for years. The prisons are overcrowded. Prisoners often get little food. HIV and TB are widespread, and healthcare is inadequate. Large numbers of pre-trial detainees, often held for long periods awaiting trial, mix with the general prison population, and frequently have inadequate legal counsel.

Amnesty International has called for a retrial by a regular court of 26 men jailed by an Egyptian emergency court for their alleged links to the Lebanese group, Hizbullah amid allegations of torture. The special court on Wednesday sentenced the menGovernment urged to conduct a – who included Lebanese, Palestinians, Egyptians and one Sudanese – to jail terms ranging from six months to life.

The pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has rejected an appeal by prosecutors to overturn an earlier decision declining to confirm charges against a rebel leader accused of directing the September 2007 attack that killed a dozen African Union peacekeepers in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region. In February, the chamber said there was insufficient evidence to establish that Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, who commands a splinter group of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), could be held criminally responsible for the crimes he has been charged with.

Tourism Minister Walter Mzembi has said North Korea’s World Cup squad will no longer visit and play a friendly match in Bulawayo, following unprecedented pressure from residents who labelled the planned trip ‘insensitive.’ There was massive opposition in the Matabeleland region to the team’s proposed visit to Bulawayo, after it revived memories of the brutal political massacres of the 1980’s.

Médecins Sans Frontières has expressed concern over calls to place limits on how much funding will be available for future rounds of proposals and/or to postpone the next request for proposals for Round 10. In a letter send to board delegations this week MSF calls on them to reject these calls.

The quality of research examining HIV prevention programmes targeted at young people in Africa is poor, according to the authors of a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the online edition of AIDS. Moreover, evidence that such prevention programmes had an effect was limited and confined to sub-group

"A vote for secession [in the 2011 referendum] is a foregone conclusion - given overwhelming Southern popular sentiment - but the time remaining to ensure that the process is orderly, legitimate, and consensual is desperately short. The potential flashpoints for a new war are many. Any new armed conflict runs the risk of becoming rapidly regionalized and difficult to contain, let alone resolve." - Alex de Waal. This comment comes in the first chapter of a timely assessment by the Heinrich Boell Foundation of the options for Sudan after the elections and the forthcoming referendum on Southern Africa.