Guest editor David Anderson Hooker, Director of Research and Training for 'Coming to the Table: Taking America (USA) Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement', and the editorial staff of Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, invite submissions for the first issue of its fifth volume, entitled '500 Years Later: Reverberations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade'.

There are no technology shortcuts to good education. For primary and secondary schools that are underperforming or limited in resources, efforts to improve education should focus almost exclusively on better teachers and stronger administrations. Information technology, if used at all, should be targeted for certain, specific uses or limited to well-funded schools whose fundamentals are not in question, argues this article.

The South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF) has added its voice to those condemning police for arresting two journalists while they were carrying out normal reporting duties. Penwell Dlamini and Antonio Muchave were arrested by Hillbrow police on 29 December. They were detained while covering a story on the eviction of nine families from Regal Court flats in Johannesburg city centre.

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrests and disappearances of bloggers and online activists across a number of Tunisian cities. The worldwide press freedom organisation has monitored at least five such cases but the list could well be longer. Police arrested the bloggers to question them about hacking into government websites by the militant group Anonymous, several sources told the organisation.

In the midst of recent protests in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian public discovered a new source of information which enabled them to get the latest developments as soon as they took place. Social media sites such as Facebook now compete with professional news organisations, which some observers have criticised for not reporting on the demonstrations.

Hacktivists have struck a blow against the regime in Zimbabwe by attacking a number of government websites. The cyber-assault appears to have been in support of newspapers who published secret cables in the ongoing WikiLeaks saga, to the annoyance of the-powers-that-be in the country. Grace Mugabe, wife of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, was recently reported to be suing a newspaper for $15 million after it published a WikiLeaks cable that claimed she has benefited from illegal diamond trading.

The January 2011 edition of Gay Kenya has articles on being gay and being safe, a Kenyan activist who has been granted asylum in the US and the do's and don't's of gay dating sites.

In this interview with Annar Cassam, the co-editor of 'Africa's Liberation: The Legacy of Nyerere' Cassam discusses Nyerere's life and contribution to Africa. The book includes contributions from leading commentators, those who worked and fought imperialism alongside Nyerere, members of a younger generation – and Nyerere in his own words. Their writings reflect on Nyerere and liberation, the Commonwealth, leadership, economic development, land, human rights and education. Above all, they are a testament to the growing recognition of the need to rekindle the fires of African socialism to which Nyerere was deeply committed.

The latest release from the whistleblower website WikiLeaks says President Robert Mugabe regards SADC facilitator to the Zimbabwe crisis South African President Jacob Zuma as a 'man of the people who likes to make promises without necessarily knowing how to fulfil them'. The website also says President Mugabe views former SA leader Thabo Mbeki as a 'great man' who is 'judgmental and calculating and cautious with policies'.

An editor of an independent newspaper Agnes Uwimana is at the mercy of a Rwandan prosecutor who is pushing for a 33-year prison sentence, according to state radio on Thursday. She has been accused of denying the 1994 genocide and would know her fate on 4 February at the High Court. Uwimana appeared before the country's High Court on charges of negating the 1994 genocide, defaming senior officials - including President Paul Kagame - and disturbing the peace, all through articles published last year, Radio Rwanda reported.

The physical laying of the optic fibre cable in Rwanda, which includes civil works, laying of ducts and installation of the fibre is complete. Patrick Nyirishema,the Deputy Director of Rwanda Development Board (RDB) in charge of Information Technology said. The infrastructure will boost access to various broadband services including fast tracking government initiatives like e-Governance, e-Banking, e-Learning, e-Health, and other applications.

To many people Facebook is a tool to announce what they are doing or what they have done, yet to some Zambians, it is being used as ‘Agony Aunt’ from which they are seeking advice on many social problems affecting them, reports Global Voices. A social work graduate from the University of Zambia, Tina Banda, started a Facebook page called Real Life and Hot Issues Discussion Forum with Tina Banda on which a number of topics are posted everyday and responses given by other Facebook users.

The Accra-based sub-regional rights body, Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), has decried the 'high-handedness' of Ghana’s security agencies against media workers while calling on authorities 'to ensure that journalists pursue their legitimate duties without fear or intimidation', PANA reports. MFWA made the call in a statement signed by its Executive Director, Prof. Kwame Karikari, following the arrest and detention of a radio journalist, Issah Murtala Kpambe.

Wikileaks has revealed diplomatic cables complaining of favouritism and suspicion of corruption in the manner Air Tanzania Company Limited (ATCL) went about shopping for jetliners for its ageing fleet four years ago. The newspaper report titled: 'Diplomats Help Push Sales of Jetliners on the Global Market. Tanzania and the Fight to Stop Airbus Sale,' said Boeing executives, at times, were pressed by foreign government officials and airline executives to hire 'agents' or other intermediaries to help deliver a sale.

Online activists have attacked and at least momentarily disabled several Tunisian government websites in the latest act of protest against the country's embattled leadership. As of Monday afternoon, local time, at least eight websites had been affected, including those for the president, prime minister, ministry of industry, ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange. The attack, which began on Sunday night, coincided with a national strike, planned to take place on Monday, that organisers said would be the biggest popular event of its size since Zine El Abidine Ben Ali assumed the presidency.

Egypt was offered nuclear weapons, material and expertise on the black market after the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to a senior Egyptian diplomat. President Hosni Mubarak turned down the offer, but the incident raises new questions over what nuclear sales were made by the other states or groups in the chaos of the early 1990s in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Maged Abdelaziz, the country’s ambassador to the UN, made the revelation to America’s top negotiator on nuclear arms control, Rose Gottemoeller, in a conversation reported in a leaked US cable in May last year.

The Tanzanian prosecutor investigating worldwide misconduct by BAE, Britain’s biggest arms company, confided to US diplomats that 'his life may be in danger' and senior politicians in his small African country were 'untouchable'. A leaked account of what the head of Tanzania’s anti-corruption bureau, Edward Hoseah, termed the 'dirty deal' by BAE to sell Tanzania an overpriced radar system, is revealed in the US embassy cables.

Mauritius plans to summon Britain's top diplomat in the country after a leaked US cable suggested a new marine park around the disputed Chagos islands was a ploy to stop uprooted islanders returning home. Mauritius' Foreign Affairs Minister Arvin Boolell was quoted in local newspapers as saying the classified document confirmed his government's belief that the protected area was in fact a smoke-screen.

Judges in one of the world's most controversial war crimes trials have been deliberately slowing down proceedings, senior US officials believe, causing significant delays to proceedings. Secret cables reveal US doubts about the trial in The Hague of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, amid allegations that one of the judges has manipulated proceedings so that she can personally give the verdict in the case.

Africans are coupling their already extensive use of cell phones with a more recent and massive interest in social media — Internet-based tools and platforms that allow people to interact with each other much more than in the past. In the process, Africans are leading what may be the next global trend: a major shift to mobile Internet use, with social media as its main drivers.