The trial of murdered rightwing leader Eugene Terre'Blanche resumed in the Ventersdorp Magistrate's Court on 30 January. Just before lunch there was a standoff between AWB supporters attending the trial and black residents over the singing of Bobbejaan klim die berg by the AWB to which the residents responded with Awuleth' Umshini wami. Chris Mahlangu and a minor are accused of beating and hacking 69-year-old Terre'Blanche to death with a panga and metal pipe in his farmhouse on April 3 2010. Both have pleaded not guilty to murder, housebreaking and robbery with aggravating circumstances. Mahlangu claims he acted in self defence. The teenager has denied involvement in the crime.

Libya will do all it can to protect its 75 per cent stake in Zamtel, the fixed-line telecoms firm in Zambia, whose government announced plans last week to seize Libya's stake in the firm, Libyan Foreign Minister Ashour bin Khayyal said Monday. 'The Zambian government has taken a unilateral action by nationalizing this company,' Khayyal said, adding he had spoken to his Zambian counterpart about the issue at the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital. The previous Zambian government had sold the 75 percent stake to LAP Green Networks for $257 million in 2010. Libyan Foreign Minister Ashour bin Khayyal said: 'Definitely this money is Libyan money, and owned by the Libyan people. We will exercise all our efforts to protect this money.'

Over the past few weeks some 900 residents of the Zimbabwean capital Harare have been diagnosed with typhoid, and about 60 have been admitted to hospital, say health authorities. There have been no confirmed fatalities from the disease, although senior health officials, who declined to be identified, told IRIN they were investigating the cause of some deaths at hospitals.

The African Union has extended the mandate of its top official Jean Ping after an election, in which he was challenged by South Africa's Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, deadlocked. Intense campaigns had preceded the vote for commission chief which dominated the AU summit in the Ethiopia capital, where leaders gathered to discuss broadening trade within Africa and tackling conflict hot spots.

In the context of the recent takeover of South Africa's Limpopo province by the country's national treasury, apparently because the province was bankrupt, the Mail and Guardian newspaper visited the province and have published this multimedia package showing how the lives of ordinary people are effected by a lack of service delivery.

In December, Pambazuka News carried that had exposed labour abuses in Chinese state-owned copper mines in Zambia. Here, Human Rights Watch responds to that critique.

Four men were jailed for 18 years on Wednesday for stabbing and stoning 19-year-old lesbian Zoliswa Nkonyana to death in 2006. Lubabalo Ntlabathi, Sicelo Mase, Luyanda Londzi and Mbulelo Damba were sentenced by the Khayelitsha Regional Court to 18 years, four of which were suspended for five years. A crowd outside the court cheered, sang, raised their fists and danced when news came that the men had been sentenced. The National Prosecuting Authority had asked for the men to be sentenced to 15 years each.

This video report for the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) on the mistreatment of asylum seekers in Israel was submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on 30 January 2012. It presents evidence of racial discrimination towards African asylum seekers and refugees who have walked across Israel's open border with Egypt.

Angola's state-controlled oil company Sonangol - the largest single shareholder in Portugal's Millennium bcp - wants the bank to gain global scale in a restructuring that involves a management shakeup, Expresso weekly said. The lender - Portugal's largest by assets - is hampered at home by the country's debt crisis and deep austerity imposed by a 78-billion-euro bailout. It needs to find fresh capital in the next few months to comply with new European rules, with cash from rapidly-growing Angola seen as one possible solution.

A close aide to former Nigerian military ruler Sani Abacha has been sentenced to hang for killing the wife of politician Moshood Abiola in 1996. Major Hamza al-Mustapha has been in detention since 1999 over the killing. Abiola is widely believed to have won the 1993 election, which was annulled by Nigeria's junta. His wife Kudirat was shot dead in 1996.

There are about one million Ugandans living in South Sudan, according to the Kampala City Traders’ Association (KCTA). But life is not easy for the Ugandan traders who supply South Sudan with many essential goods. On a side road at the market, a Southern Sudanese policeman wearing orange fatigues strikes a passing Ugandan with his rubber whip a few times, seemingly without any provocation. The Ugandan winces and then continues on his way. Ugandan migrants say such incidents - and much worse - are not uncommon. They say they have been beaten, arrested without cause and faced a plethora of other forms of harassment by Southern Sudanese security forces.

Health services in northern Uganda are still scarce in the wake of the region's 20-year civil war, leaving many battling diseases that could be cured with proper medical treatment. Elephantiasis is a widespread disease caused by a parasite that causes limbs to swell up, leaving sufferers in pain and often ostracised from their communities. According to the World Health Organisation [WHO], neglected tropical diseases, such as elephantiasis, affect more than one billion people, primarily poor populations living in tropical and subtropical climates.

Several political parties, including the DA and ANC, are expected to make representations to the Press Freedom Commission (PFC), when it resumes hearings. Monday 30 January marked the start of the latest and final round of hearings on how best to regulate the print media. Possible models include independent regulation, co-regulation, self-regulation, and statutory regulation.

The Kenyan government plans to move hundreds of thousands of refugees to Somalia, a plan condemned by the The Refugee Consortium of Kenya.

Cosatu has mirrored the ANC's offensive on the print media faithfully, finding that the three major newspaper groups 'reflect the outlook and prejudices of the capitalist class' and backing calls for tougher regulation of the press. In a six-page submission to the Press Freedom Commission (PFC), the federation praises the ANC for having 'opened up an important public debate' on its 2007 Polokwane conference resolution on the media, and particularly for its investigation of a statutory media appeals tribunal.

Angola's ruling MPLA party has defended the re-appointment of the electoral commission chief and said opposition criticism was aimed at causing instability before an election this year. UNITA lawmakers and those of three smaller opposition parties walked out of parliament in protest as the election commission members were sworn in earlier on Wednesday, the state news agency Angop reported.

Malawi has dropped 67 places on the 2011/2012 press freedom index as a result of the 'totalitarian tendencies' of President Bingu wa Mutharika, French based media watchdog Reporters Without Boarders (RWB) has said. Malawi is now at position 146 alongside Indonesia out of 225 assessed countries.

Mozambique granted concessions to investors for more than 2.5 million hectares (ha) of land between 2004 and the end of 2009, says the Oakland Institute's country report on Mozambique, which forms part of a multi-country study on understanding land investment deals in Africa. 'Mozambique’s history of Portuguese colonialism, three wars, and then the imposition by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund of a harsh neo-liberal economic model led the government in the 1990s to accept the idea that the only way to promote development and end poverty was through encouraging foreign investment. Mozambique was identified by the World Bank as one of five sparsely populated African countries with large tracts of land available for rainfed cultivation. After 2000 rising food and fuel prices and new climate change-related attention on forests triggered the interest of investors in Mozambique, particularly for trees (for paper, timber and carbon credits) and agrofuels (notably sugar and jatropha).'

Google Kenya country manager Olga Arara-Kimani has left the firm days after the Internet giant said it had taken action against employees implicated in a recent data poaching scandal. Arara-Kimani, who had been at the helm of the firm’s Kenyan operations when the scandal broke, said someone had to take responsibility. Two weeks ago, Kenyan online business directory firm Mocality accused Google of fraudulently using its data to sell competing product to clients.

Prominent Senegalese opposition activist Alioune Tine has been released after spending two days in detention. Tine is a member of the opposition June 23 Movement (M23), formed after countrywide protests last year against incumbent President Abdoulaye Wade's plans to run for a third term. Tine told the AFP agency he had been freed without charge.