Europe's biggest banks are happy to do business with corrupt regimes in Africa and Central Asia, according to a new report by UK-based NGO, Global Witness. As late as November 2007, Barclays in Paris held a private account for Teodorin Obiang, the study says. A scion of the ruling family in Equatorial Guinea, Mr Obiang in the past 10 years spent €4.5 million on sports cars even as 20 percent of children die before their fifth birthday due to poverty in the oil-rich country.

While EU and other global leaders have talked tough about re-regulating the financial sector in the wake of the economic crisis, they remain committed to pushing through banking deregulation in the developing world via trade deals. This strategy is undermining poverty reduction in these countries and is reproducing the same type of circumstances that led to the crisis in the first place, warns a new report published on Wednesday (11 March) by the World Development Movement, an UK-based anti-poverty NGO.

Delta is now awash with British and American private military companies (PMCs) engaged in security services for their clients in the oil and gas industry, is particularly chilling. The story titled The mercenaries take over and published on February 22, says no fewer than 10 such companies, prominent among them Control Risk—which has on its payroll the former body guard of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, Erinys International and ArmorGroup, currently operate in the restive Niger Delta, some through spurious partnerships with local companies.

The decolonisation of Africa from the 1950s saw the irruption on the world stage of multiple, new nation-states. Between 1951 (Libyan independence) and 1994 (the end of apartheid in South Africa), 50 states emerged. Most dramatic were the months between January 1960 and November of the same year. In eleven months, 17 new states. By the end of 1962, France's African Empire was in tatters.

Working with the United Nations Human Rights Programme: A Handbook for Civil Society is a new, user-friendly and authoritative publication on United Nations human rights bodies and mechanisms – explaining how they work and exploring the many important ways that civil society actors including NGOs can contribute to their work.

Nearly 15 years since apartheid ended, millions of black South Africans still live in self-built shacks – without sanitation, adequate water supplies, or electricity. But A Place in the City will overturn all your assumptions about ‘slums’ and the people who live in them. In this film, shot in the vast shack settlements in and around Durban, members of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the grassroots shackdwellers’ movement, lay out their case against forcible eviction and for decent services with passion and eloquence, in a political climate where grassroots campaigners like them are more likely to be met with rubber bullets than with offers to talk.

Kenya’s dalliance with previous unlikely allies blossomed further last week when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned his tour of the country into a window of business opportunity. As he flew out, the Iranian leader’s imprint on the country’s struggling economy left no doubts about the Middle East nation’s determination to raise its trade and investment portfolios, which hitherto were dominated by the West.

The is an opportunity for all resource-rich countries, like Kenya and much of Africa, to completely change the global system. We have been told to export, grow for export, export and more export. We have ignored our own people. There are a few things that we need to import but not many, and with innovation and work we can make substitutes, use our own resources, make our own goods. It seems impossible - that is what the North wants us to think - but it is not. When Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia was under real sanctions (1965-1980), every effort went into manufacturing substitutes. Of course there was some 'sanctions busting'... oil and medicines were two things we had to import.

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award was established in 1984 by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend to honor these courageous and innovative individuals striving for social justice throughout the world. The recipients are chosen through an extensive annual selection process. Every year from February until March, the public is invited to nominate creative and courageous non-governmental human rights defenders. The nomination deadline is March 15, 2009. Nominations will not be accepted past this date.

On 28 March thousands will march through London as part of a global campaign to challenge the G20, ahead of its 2 April summit on the global financial crisis. Even before the banking collapse, the world suffered poverty, inequality and the threat of climate chaos. The world has followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental.

The DRC’s desire to choose its own mining trading partners, whether Chinese investors or Western corporations, calls the bluff of global financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, writes Antoine Roger Lokongo. Negotiations the country has conducted reveal how these institutions are putting pressure on the DRC government to ditch the Socomin deal with China – a Beijing-based, joint-venture between the DRC’s Gécamines and a group of Chinese state-owned enterprises – as a condition to get its debt forgiven. That is clearly blackmail, Lokongo maintains, and is inconsistent with the spirit of free trade and globalisation.

The arrest warrant issued against the president of Sudan offers new hope to the people of Darfur because it will dissuade attacks, even though the immediate consequences are dire, a Darfur rebel leader said on Friday. The International Criminal Court issued the warrant on Wednesday for Omar Hassan al-Bashir to face charges of war crimes in Darfur, and Khartoum responded by expelling 13 foreign humanitarian organisations from Sudan.

The Sudanese government has ordered some aid agencies to leave the country after an arrest warrant was issued for the country's president, a UN official said. UN spokesperson, Michele Montas, who confirmed the development Thursday, said: " Sudan told up to 10 humanitarian groups to leave the country's Darfur region or cut back on services provided, as well as seized their assets''.

In a new report Yes we can? Options and barriers to broadening the scope of the Responsibility to Protect to include cases of economic, social and cultural rights abuse, the One World Trust explores the environment of human rights standards from which the R2P has in part emerged, and which are necessary to understand its potential of development.

China announced its latest double-digit rise in defence spending on Wednesday but sought to soothe concerns in Asia and the United States by insisting its expanding military posed no threat. The defence budget will grow 14.9 percent for 2009, a parliament official said, maintaining a string of double-figure annual increases, despite a punishing slowdown in the Chinese economy as worldwide demand for its exports sags.

Warning that China faces “unprecedented difficulties and challenges,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao outlined a barrage of construction, increased subsidies and economic measures on Thursday aimed at continuing his nation’s modernization despite a world financial crisis.

The Chinese government has pledged a further 2.5 million US dollars to finance work to remove soil from the site where the new Mozambican national stadium is being built. The schedule remains unchanged, that is, that the stadium will be complete before the football World Cup to be held in South Africa, in 2010.

China plans to spend $9 billion on mining and infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo and won’t bow to a demand from the International Monetary Fund to alter the accord, the Chinese ambassador to the country said. China’s biggest single investment in Africa will give Congo roads, railways, hospitals and schools in return for metals worth $50 billion at current prices.

Tullow Oil is the latest Africa-focused energy firm to draw Chinese takeover interest, but the $8 billion oil and gas independent, emboldened by its prospects, has snubbed potential buyers, dealmakers say. London-listed Tullow runs oil and gas projects in 23 countries across Africa, Europe, South Asia, and South America.

Kenya will sign an an MOU with the Chinese Government on anti-piracy measure which will entail a protocol on handing over of captured suspected pirates to the Kenya Government for prosecution purposes, Minister for Foreign Affairs Hon Moses Wetang'ula has said. The Minister also welcomed China's decision to send warships to patrol the Somali coast in an effort to combat piracy.