Every week in SA, police target black people whom they perceive to be foreigners for harassment. The practice has become so prevalent that it has become the subject of a number of studies by various human rights bodies.

"If South Africa wants to send me back to Zimbabwe it would be a death sentence," former Zimbabwean opposition MP Roy Bennett has said. Bennett fled to South Africa in March after being implicated in an arms find in Mutare, eastern Zimbabwe. His asylum application was rejected by the South African Department of Home Affairs.

Zambian authorities have confirmed that the repatriation of thousands of Angolan refugees had been stalled owing to a cholera outbreak in the western neighbouring country that has killed more than 1 400 people. Home affairs permanent secretary Peter Mumba said the cholera situation in Angola was "worrisome" and there was need to be cautious in the repatriation exercise.

Amnesty International released the first-ever satellite images of the wholesale destruction of a large community in Zimbabwe - providing the clearest possible evidence to date of the devastating impact of the Zimbabwean government's policy of house demolitions. "These satellite images are irrefutable evidence - if further evidence is even needed - that the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities - completely erased them from the map, as if they never existed," said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa programme.

The leaders of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the former rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) have failed to resolve their disagreements on the implementation of the January 2005 peace agreement which ended the country's 21-year civil war. Despite the difficulties, President Umar al-Bashir and the First Vice-President Salva Kiir Mayardit affirmed their determination to fully implement the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which was signed in Nairobi, Kenya.

Most people have never heard of Nagmeldin Abdallah. It is impossible to reach him in the eastern Sudanese prison where he waits for word on an appeal that may save his life. But Abdallah has achieved minor notoriety in activist circles. Sudan's complex death penalty statutes may never have gained international attention were it not for Abdallah, who claims he was 15 when he was sentenced to death for killing a vegetable seller in 2003.

The number of Somalis who are getting out by sea to Yemen has increased in the last few days because of the current bloody warfare in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Sources said that the death toll at sea during trips from Somalia to Yemen through the Gulf of Aden was getting higher.

A special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury - the head of the Anglican Church worldwide - is expected in Kenya to try and defuse the escalating row over the visit of the Bishop of Chelmsford, a supporter of gay rights. The visit has spurred controversy over Bishop John Gladwin's support for the "full inclusion" organisation, which supports a more liberal approach to the inclusion of gay people within the church. Both the Times and Daily Telegraph newspapers have accused Kenya's Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of "abandoning" Bishop Gladwin during his trip.

Conflict between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has displaced 1.6 million northern Ugandans. The LRA has abducted an estimated 28,000 children, destroyed schools and forced children to become 'night commuters' by moving every evening from their homes into towns to sleep. Peace will not be possible without greater focus on education.

Conflict can devastate a country's education system. It reverses efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for universal completion of primary education and for gender equality in schools by 2015. At the same time, rebuilding education is increasingly seen as essential to reduce the risk of countries falling back into conflict.

Specialists have emphasised the importance of education for children both as a route out of poverty and for realising their potential. There is a tendency to assume that migration undermines children's education, as most children's migration is for work.

Today (25 May), on the first anniversary of the attacks made on referendum day, 24 Egyptian NGOs announced that the African Commission for Human and Peoples' Rights, of the African Union, has decided to take on the lawsuit that organizations have raised against the Egyptian government over the physical and sexual harassment of a number of female journalists and political activists.

Egyptian police allegedly tortured two protesters - sexually assaulting one of them - after a peaceful demonstration in support of pro-reform judges, a lawyer and an opposition group said Friday (26 May). Activist Mohammed el-Sharkawi, 24, was sodomized "using a rolled up piece of cardboard for nearly 15 minutes," his lawyer Gamal Eid told The Associated Press. "Almost all of el-Sharkawi's body is bruised, swollen, or cut," Eid said. "I haven't seen such brutality and sadism since 1995," he added, referring to a period when the state mounted a crackdown on Islamic militants.

Members of militias fighting for control of the Somali capital could face war crimes charges for attempting to prevent the wounded and civilians from receiving assistance during the conflict, a U.N. official warned Monday (29 May). The battle between fundamentalist Islamic militias and rival secular combatants has forced about 1,500 to seek treatment at Mogadishu's two main hospitals since the beginning of this year, said Eric Laroche, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia.

Most of the children rounded up by the police during a new onslaught on Harare’s street people have been dumped at a heavily guarded Melfort Camp near Bromley. When The Standard crew visited the camp, older street children were busy collecting firewood under police escort. There were four large tents pitched up to accommodate vagrants, rounded up during the operation, which started on 12 April.

In four major refugee camps less than 40 kilometres north of Bekoningka, the southern Chadian border village, basic shelter and protection is provided to 48,000 CAR refugees by the UN's refugee agency UNHCR. But new arrivals have been told by the local authorities that they must wait to be registered at Bekoningka before they can move to the camps. Life for the squatters is hard, even by local standards, in a region where few can afford even the basics, and low prices for cotton, the region's main crop, has devastated incomes this year.

Following several months of research in and around Maridi, southern Sudan, Jake Phelan and Graham Wood explore the impact of return and reintegration in Western Equatoria. At the southern tip of Sudan, Western Equatoria borders Uganda, CAR and the DRC and represents a cross roads for many of the refugees returning “home” from these countries.

Peace talks between the government of Burundi and the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL), the country's remaining rebel group, have began in Tanzania's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. Burundi is emerging from over a decade of civil war, which erupted in 1993 following the assassination of the country's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, who was from the ethnic Hutu majority. Paratroopers of the then-minority, Tutsi-dominated army allegedly killed Ndadaye.

Clashes between militias in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, have left 13 people dead, days after some of the heaviest fighting seen in the city for years. The latest violence has been centred in the Daynile and Galgalato districts. Some 200 people have died in clashes this year between militias loyal to Mogadishu's Islamic courts and an alliance of warlords. The fighting is the worst the city has seen for more than a decade.

An African Union peacekeeper in Sudan's Darfur region has been killed in an ambush by unknown men. A peacekeeping base was later attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. One peacekeeper was badly injured; five had less serious wounds. An AU spokesman said peacekeepers were being targeted by groups opposed to a peace deal signed earlier this month.