Social interaction between host community members and refugees are taking place within the camps at a significant scale, according to a September 2010 study entitled 'Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts of Dadaab Refugee Camps on Host Communities'. One of the findings of the study is that refugees are seen as getting the better deal as international humanitarian standards are applied to refugees but not to host communities.

Greenpeace urges the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Energy (IMC) to consider an energy mix which among others calls for a nuclear free energy future. This follows the approval of the release of the Executive Summary, and the Medium Term Risk Mitigation Plan (MTRM) for Electricity in South Africa - 2010 to 2016 of the draft IRP 2010 for public comment. As Greenpeace’s Nkopane Maphiri states, 'The proposed balanced scenario will do very little to foster robust investments in the renewable technologies.'

Five people were killed on Tuesday in Algeria when a remote control bomb exploded on a construction site in the town of Tlidjen near the Algeria-Tunisia border. Security officials said the bomb had targeted public works officials who were inspecting the construction site of new homes. Those killed were three local public works officials and two entrepreneurs, AFP said.

Professional civil society has won some important victories in post-apartheid South Africa, but has not stopped material inequality from worsening, writes Richard Pithouse. 'When a social system is not working, people have the right to challenge it directly and outside of the rules that it sets for engagement. Until and unless we reach a point where the actions of the state are beginning to turn the tide against economic and political exclusion, the state’s legal right to declare popular forms of revolt illegitimate has no moral standing.'

As part of a broad coalition, War on Want has submitted a letter to the UK government demanding the immediate release of three detained Saharawi human rights activists. One year ago, a group of prominent Saharawi human rights defenders were arrested upon their return from a humanitarian visit to Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria. Despite not having committed any crime, the activists were charged with threatening Moroccan national security.

Shooting on Monday night by northern Sudan soldiers was an attempt to start clashes in the oil-rich region of Abyei, southern former rebels say. SPLM spokesman Kuol Deim Kuol said four soldiers went into Abyei town's market and fired at random, wounding a trader. He told the BBC it was a pretext to start trouble, as UN-mediated talks on Abyei's referendum ended in failure.

A minister kidnapped by pirates in Somalia's semi-autonomous region of Puntland has been freed. Ports Minister Said Mohamed Rageh was ambushed last Friday and held in the remote pirate stronghold of Jariban. His release came after negotiations between the pirates and Somali elders.

The story of a 37-year-old man who died after being detained by police has grabbed the attention of bloggers and online activists, says this post on Global Voices. It comes amidst a climate of decline in freedom of the press in the country and is not at isolated incident, says the post.

It is the rainy season in Southern Sudan. The annual floods don’t make life any easier in an area already struggling to recover from decades of civil war. But this year, the flooding was unusually severe. In mid-September, heavy rains caused rivers to break their banks and flood the lowlands of Aweil South, in Northern Bahr El Ghazal state — submerging villages, crops and grazing land for cattle. Hundreds of people who would have been taking in a harvest of sorghum and groundnuts — now ruined, along with their homes — are instead camping by the roadside.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said the arrest on Monday of Rwandan rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana in France for serious crimes in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009 sends a strong signal to other abusive commanders that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will be persistent in its apprehensi on of suspects. French police arrested Mbarushimana Monday morning in Paris, where he has resided since 2003.

A recent report confirmed that the Lundin Oil Consortium led by the Swedish Oil Company Lundin Oil AB had caused enormous loss of human lives and destruction of property in Sudan, says this article on The Current Analyst. 'The start of oil exploration by Lundin in 1997 set of a vicious war in the area. The case of Lundin in Sudan could be taken as the most telling and convincing testimony of the link between oil and destructive civil wars in Africa.'

Dr Kizza Besigye has called for the resignation of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney General after the Constitutional Court ordered that he and 10 others be discharged from any further prosecution arising from the treason charges they have been facing since 2005. All the five judges said they could not allow continued trial of the suspects when their fundamental human rights were being grossly violated by state agents.

Nigerian former militant leader Henry Okah will be kept apart from other prisoners at a Johannesburg prison until his bail application is heard next week, his attorney said on Tuesday. 'By agreement between us and the state Mr Okah will be held in a single cell at the Johannesburg Correctional Centre,' his attorney Rudi Krause told Sapa.

The refugee and displacement problem is one of the most complex humanitarian issues facing the Middle East, aid workers say. Elizabeth Campbell, senior advocate at US NGO Refugees International, believes it is likely the Middle East hosts the highest number of refugees and asylum-seekers in the world. She underlined the need to find lasting solutions: 'Any time that people remain uprooted and have not been afforded basic rights or pathways to durable solutions, it is a humanitarian crisis. In this article from IRIN, the refugee challenges of the countries in the region are profiled.

An Ethiopian diplomatic source in Jeddah has told Gulf News that Saudi authorities had deported 725 Ethiopians who had been detained at a deportation centre of the Saudi Passport department following a riot that erupted at the facility that led to the escape of many prisoners last Wednesday. Security forces are still continuing a search for several detainees who fled the detention centre.

The Mandela Park Back-yarders, a social movement in Cape Town, describes the aftermath of the situation in Hout Bay in Cape Town, where the City of Cape Town attempted to demolish shacks they claimed where illegally built.

An important new report from Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), 'A nice judge on a good day: immigration bail and the right to liberty', reveals the systemic failures within the UK legal system which consigns detainees to oblivion for months or years, reports this article on the website of the Institute of Race Relations.

'Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival' is written by leading migration scholars, many from the Zimbabwean diaspora. The book explores the relationship between Zimbabwe’s economic and political crisis and migration as a survival strategy. It includes the personal stories of ordinary Zimbabweans living and working in other countries, and reports the hostility and xenophobia they experience.

Jamaica: 70 killed in street fighting in May 2010. Nigeria: an estimated 1,000 people killed in the country’s oil region in 2008. Kenya: 140 lives lost in post-election riots in 2007. Mexico: 28,000 people dead from drug-related violence since 2006. Troubling as such figures are, they are but a small part of a much larger picture: there are up to 490,000 deaths annually that result from homicidal and non-conflict violence – a quarter of a million more than those who die in war zones.

Yaounde's Briketteri neighbourhood, home to Muslim traders in textiles and beef, is seeing a surge of climate migrants - farmers and fishermen fleeing fast - drying Lake Chad to the north. Lake Chad, a large shallow freshwater lake that borders Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has shrunk in size by as much as 90 per cent over the last four decades, forcing a growing number of farmers, fishermen and herders who depend on it to seek new livelihoods elsewhere.