After four months of tough negotiations, Chinese and Russian officials February 17 signed a package of energy cooperation agreements, finalizing a credit-for-oil deal worth US$ 25 billion. The package includes a plan for a pipeline connecting Russian energy fields to Chinese consumers, long-term crude oil trading deals, and a loan from Chinese banks to Russian oil firms.

China's navy will renew an anti-piracy mission to the Gulf of Aden when the current commitment expires in the coming months, a naval top officer was quoted as saying by state media on Monday. China's three-ship anti-piracy flotilla took up its duties off the Somali coast in January on a four-month mission and new ships will be sent to take over in late April or in early May, the China Daily newspaper quoted the navy deputy chief of staff, Rear Adm. Zhang Deshun, as saying.

Stanbic Bank has partnered with the Chinese businessperson in Uganda to boost trade between Uganda and China. The partnership resulted into the formation of the China Enterprises Chamber of Commerce in Uganda (CECCU), aimed at promoting trade and economic ties between the two countries. CECCU, which was launched last week, brings together over 30 Chinese firms operating in Uganda.

China Minmetals Corp., buying OZ Minerals Ltd. for A$2.6 billion ($1.7 billion), is seeking metal assets in South America and southern Africa, taking advantage of seven-year low commodity prices to secure supplies. China’s largest metals trader may also “do some domestic acquisitions” this year, President Zhou Zhongshu said today in Beijing. It is still waiting for approval from the Chinese government for its planned takeover of Australia’s OZ Minerals, he also said.

China is regaining its appetite for acquisitions in Africa as asset prices on the continent tumble, according to Standard Bank, Africa’s largest lender that is partially owned by China’s biggest bank. Jacko Maree, Standard’s chief executive, said in an interview with the Financial Times that Chinese companies were readying to “turn on the taps” once more after 2007’s surge of investment into Africa fell away dramatically due to the global financial crisis.

South Africa's Standard Bank is to take a 33 percent stake in Russian investment bank Troika Dialog, forging a major partnership deal despite the mounting economic crisis in Russia, the companies said Friday. Standard Bank will acquire the stake for 200 million dollars (158 million euros) through a convertible loan while also handing over its Russia operations and all its Russian business to Troika Dialog, the Russian bank said in a statement.

Attacking the US for its alleged double standards, Sudan Friday sought India’s diplomatic support against International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s decision to indict President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of genocide in Darfur. “Sudan strongly rejects the decision of the ICC. The targeting of Sudan’s president is political, not judicial,” Omer Elamin Abdalla, charge d’affaires at the Sudanese embassy, told reporters here.

Italy will help Africa through the global economic downturn and aid its recovery when the worst is over, an Italian government official said here on Wednesday. At a briefing after a two-day meeting concerning the impact of the global economic crisis on funding for African infrastructure, Foreign Undersecretary Vincenzo Scotti said Italy will propose "financial mechanisms that mitigate risk and foster greater funding from private groups" at this year's G8 summit on the island of La Maddalena off Sardinia.

Togo is like much of West Africa — small, poor and an occasional producer of sensational soccer players—but for the bank. Lomé, Togo's capital, is home to Ecobank, a 21-year-old pan-African retail and corporate bank that, according to CEO Arnold Ekpe, employs 11,000 people in 620 branches in 26 countries, with a balance sheet of $8 billion.

In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and biggest oil producer, low crude prices are dragging down growth expectations, foreshadowing a dramatic slowdown in an economy that was teetering even in the good years. Nigeria has long struggled with a fractious federal system, endemic corruption and ramshackle infrastructure -- all factors that kept the commodities boom from lifting living standards significantly for most of the co

“POOR countries are innocent,” says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian managing director of the World Bank. They did not contribute one jot to the global credit crunch, and their banks and firms have few links to global capital markets. For a while, it seemed as if the rich world’s mess might even pass them by. The oil-price fall of 2008 benefited oil-importing developing countries to the tune of 2% of their national incomes.

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.