A vicious land grab is being carried out in Uganda, pairing the country’s dictator with an ‘investor,’ and the targets are the Acholi, genocide survivors who live on abundant, fertile and mineral-rich land.

Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo was a poor choice to mediate the Senegalese election crisis and the voters wasted no time in throwing him out.

Following advocacy by the Refugee Law Project, the Attorney General of Uganda exercised his powers under section 24 of the Births and Deaths Registration Act and has waived the registration fees payable by refugees in order to register a birth or death in Uganda. Previously, refugees were treated as foreigners and were therefore required to pay $40 in order to obtain a birth or death certificate.

Libyan leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil has said he will defend national unity 'with force' after tribal leaders and a political faction declared that the east would become a semi-autonomous region. 'We are not prepared to divide Libya,' Jalil said, calling on eastern leaders to engage in dialogue and warning them against remnants of the former regime in their ranks.

Tanzania’s Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda has warned medical doctors in public hospitals to refrain from a nationwide strike saying the government could react with very drastic measures against them. 'At present, we see no reason to apply the force of law. We are trying to do what is humanly possible with a patriotic sense in order to avert a disaster that could affect poor patients whose lives are in the hands of medical staff,' Pinda said at a press conference he called to address the issue.

Pa Sando, the town chief of Konja, in Grand Cape Mount county in Liberia, looks out across the farmland. 'I used to pick cocoa on this farm for more than 30 years. My grandfather planted it for us,' he says. 'All this area here was mine, and now it's all gone.' The land has been leased by Sime Darby Plantation (Liberia) Inc, owned by the Malaysian-based multinational Sime Darby, to grow trees for palm oil. Sando said he was never asked whether he wanted to give up his land – only that he saw the bulldozers in the bush and then his land was taken.

Thousands of people who have returned to their homes in areas close to Ndélé, in northern Central African Republic's (CAR) Bamingui-Bangoran region, after years of displacement, are living in difficult conditions as the security situation is still precarious, say officials. Between 2009 and 2011, Ndélé was the scene of fighting between government troops and various armed rebels, forcing thousands to flee.

The Law Society of SA has written to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) raising a concern about South African judges serving on the bench in Swaziland, saying that the Swazi judiciary appeared to be compromising the rule of law. There is a long tradition of southern African judges, especially when retired, serving on the benches of each other’s courts, However, the Swazi judiciary has come in for increasing criticism over the past couple of years, reaching crisis point last year when Judge Thomas Masuku was fired by King Mswati on what were believed to be trumped-up charges.

In 2009, 37 poor families won the right to receive permanent houses in terms of an order issued by the Durban High Court. The families must now return to court to force the eThekwini Municipality to obey the order. The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI) and Abahlali baseMjondolo (ABM) are suing the Mayor of eThekwini on behalf the families, who now live in the Richmond Farm Transit Camp near KwaMashu, Durban.

Both the troops loyal to the former ruler Muammar Gaddafi and the forces that fought to oust him committed crimes against humanity and war crimes, reports the United Nations-mandated commission of inquiry that probed human rights abuses in Libya. A summary of the findings of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya says: 'Acts of murder, enforced disappearance and torture were perpetrated within the context of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.'

On the first anniversary of the dissolution of the State Security Investigation Apparatus, the April 6th Youth Movement (the Democratic Front in Alexandria), issued a statement declaring that they do not see a big difference between the state security apparatus during the regime of Mubarak and the National Security Agency, which is marred by the same shameful practices and the same violations of human rights and suppression of freedoms of activists and revolutionaries and human rights organizations and contributed to the worsening state of security chaos taking place in the country.

A section of an Egyptian pipeline supplying gas to Israel and Jordan has been blown up in the thirteenth attack on the energy link since January 2011. According to witnesses, the attack on the gas pipeline, which crosses the Sinai Peninsula, occurred on Monday in the Massaeed area west of the Mediterranean coastal town of al-Arish in the northern Sinai.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has condemned an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued for his defence minister. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Defence Minister Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein as part of an investigation into atrocities in Darfur. Hussein is the latest of several senior officials in Sudan to be indicted by the court in The Hague, which is also seeking the arrest of Bashir on charges of orchestrating genocide.

At least 77 people in southeastern Africa have been killed and more are still missing as Tropical Cyclone Irina sweeps through the region. The storm struck northern Madagascar more than two weeks ago and has slowly tracked down the west of the country. Torrential rain from the system hit the whole of the island, leading to the deaths of 65 people, weather officials said on Monday. The majority of the deaths occurred in the southeastern district of Ifanadiana. The storm has also affected southern areas of Mozambique and eastern South Africa.

On 24 February, at the same time as a British government backed meeting on the fate of Somalia was held, another conference conference was held under the sponsorship of the 'Friends of Syria' grouping. 'This initiative grew out of the failure of the US and other imperialist states to get the UN Security Council endorsement for a war against Syria,' says this article from Worker's World, which draws a parallel between the two meetings.

A group fighting for a greater share of Nigeria's oil wealth in the country's delta region has claimed responsibility for killing four police officers this week. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in an email it sent to reporters on Friday that it shot the four police officers who were on a boat patrolling the Nembe river in Bayelsa state.

An al-Qaeda splinter group has said it carried out a suicide attack on a paramilitary police base in southern Algeria which left 24 people wounded. 'We inform you that we are behind the explosion that occurred this morning at Tamanrasset,' the group told the AFP news agency on Saturday. The statement, sent just hours after the attack, was signed by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA).

More than 200 people have been killed in a series of explosions triggered by fire at a munitions depot in the Republic of Congo's capital Brazzaville, according to a senior official in the presidency, citing hospital sources. Charles Zacharie Boawo, the defence minister, appeared on national television to urge calm in Brazzaville. 'The explosions that you have heard don't mean there is a war or a coup d'etat,' he said.

With nearly 20,000 Malian refugees now in Burkina Faso, according to Burkina Minister of Communications Alain Traore, and up to 800 more crossing the border each day, the government says it urgently needs more help. The most urgent need is for 'shelter, food and medicine' in the country’s northern Sahel Region, said Denis Ouedraogo, coordinator of the National Commission for Refugees.

Hundreds of families forced from their homes in the 1990s, as well as former refugees, who are living in informal settlements on the outskirts of Bujumbura, the capital, are seeking a lasting shelter alternative to cramped temporary sites. Families were supposed to have been resettled at the Maramvya area in Bujumbura Rural's Mutimbuzi commune, in 2011, where each household would have been allocated a 270 sqm plot. But there have been challenges to the resettlement, according to officials.