Two top Muslim Brotherhood officials are being investigated by Egypt’s Attorney General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud over their role in allegedly inciting President Mohamed Morsi supporters to attack female protesters around Tahrir Square. Mohamed el-Beltagy and Essam el-Erian are under investigation, Mahmoud said. Mahmoud himself had only the day before defied an order to step down from his position after President Morsi attempted to push him out after a court acquitted former top Hosni Mubarak officials of their role in the infamous 'Camel Battle' during the 18 days of protests that ousted his rule.

The Ethiopian government on Friday said its peace talks with the Ogaden National liberation Front (ONLF) rebel group had collapsed. The two sides started negotiations in September and further talks had been scheduled to be held in Kenya. But government representatives at the talks said the ONLF had refused to recognise the Horn of Africa country's constitution, after they demanded the rebels to adhere to Ethiopian rules.

East African Environment Ministers have ended a meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, to discuss a set of radical policy proposals to deal with environmental pollution, including the introduction of a pay-as-you-pollute taxes, according to a statement from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) on Saturday. The Ministers for Environment and Natural Resources from the IGAD region met to adopt the regional environment policy and strategy as well as the environmental assessment policy framework.

With newspapers forced to close, journalists banned and reporters persecuted, Sudanese media professionals say that their nation’s press is in a worse state than ever. Sudan’s press has a turbulent history, with periods of rapid development interspersed with stints of harsh official repression. But, according to media professionals, the sector is currently in a dismal state, with rampant censorship and readers who have lost faith in journalists.

Welfare Systems are rapidly evolving in Sub-Saharan Africa, with some countries having implemented systems allowing evaluation of measures taken several decades ago. Students and researchers from Cameroon have closely examined social public policies and private sector initiatives in their country, as reports Global Voices.

Ten years after the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its doors in The Hague, the United Nations Security Council held its first open discussion on the role of the court, with some nations reiterating complaints that its docket is highly politicised and has unfairly singled out African nations for censure. The ICC is the only permanent international court with a mandate to prosecute individuals accused of the most heinous crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

An outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus in Uganda has spread to the capital Kampala after an infected woman travelled to the city and the death toll from the disease, a cousin of Ebola, climbed to five, a health official said on Monday. The latest outbreak of another haemorrhagic fever, first confirmed on Friday in Kabale district, 430 km (270 miles) southwest of Kampala, has rattled a country that only two weeks ago declared itself free of Ebola after it claimed at least 16 lives.

Police authorities have admitted that they may have been at fault in the Marikana mine shooting, with some officers either overreacting or mistakenly shooting at protesters in response to 'friendly-fire'. In an opening statement to the inquiry into the deaths of 34 workers at South Africa's Marikana mine, police officials said that 'the response of some police officers may have been disproportionate to the danger they faced from the group of more than 200 armed protesters'.

As part of its contribution to issues-based campaigns towards the December polls, the Economic Justice Network (EJN) has stated it is of the view that transforming agriculture and tackling the production and marketing constraints of small scale farmers, men and women, in rural Ghana, where all the problems of poverty are sharply experienced should be one of the topical issues as the country heads towards the December polls.

Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by a recent wave of arrests of journalists in Zimbabwe and urges the authorities to stop trying to intimidate independent privately-owned media and to take measures against those responsible for physical attacks on reporters. 'This sudden wave of lawsuits and incidents involving the police does not bode well for the coming months,' Reporters Without Borders said. 'Journalists must be guaranteed the freedom to cover political stories without fear of abusive criminal prosecutions. We are very worried about the judicial harassment of independent journalists and media in the past few weeks.'

This article on the Transparency International explores the connections between land, corruption and climate change. 'Transparency International Kenya has three Advocacy and Legal Advice Centres, which give free and confidential legal counsel to victims or witnesses of corruption. Around a quarter of the cases received at our centre in Mombasa relate to land, totalling 58 since September 2011.'

The Makause Creative Youth Brigade (MCYB) and the Makause Community Development Forum (Macodefo) are organising a march on Friday, 19 October 2012 against police brutality at Primrose Police Station (near Germiston in Ekurhuleni). The march forms part of the ‘One Makause, One Community Police Brutality Campaign’ under the Asihambi Land, Housing & Zero Evictions Campaign.

Date: Friday, 19th October 2012
Time: 12h30 pm
Venue: People will congregate at the Makause Sports Ground at the Makause Informal Settlement in Primrose and proceed to the Primrose Police Station to hand over a Memorandum to the Primrose SAPS.

The Makause community is uniting for a better, safer and crime-free kasi and demands:

· an end to police brutality
· an end to forced bribery/corruption
· proper investigation of un-attended to cases of crime
· an end to police politics and support of mob groups
· arrest of the mob group that attacked the Macodefo leadership and
destroyed the community office
· an urgent response to reported crimes.

This march to Primrose Police Station is to say:

* Enough is Enough!
* Never and Never Again!
* An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
* Makause Cannot Be Divided by the Police!
* We Have a Right to Survive/Life!
* We Have the Right to Organize, Gather, Assemble, Picket & Demonstrate!

For more information contact:

General Moyo: 073 430 7006 / [email][email protected]
Michael Dzai: 083 5023863

Journalist George Borteh, the Acting Vice President of the Judicial Reporters Association of Liberia (JURAL) and a reporter for The New Republic newspaper, was thrown in prison on 12 October, 2012, after taking a photo of Police Director Chris Massaquoi at the Temple of Justice in Monrovia. Borteh was detained for more than three hours. Massaquoi was offended by the action of the journalist. He questioned Borteh as to why he took his photo and the journalist replied by saying: 'You are a public figure on public grounds and I am taking [a] picture for record['s] sake.'

The UN feeds AMISOM’s troops, the EU pays them and the US and Italy pay Somali troops. The US, though, is the biggest single financial contributor. 'The Americans have supported the training of our troops here, in Uganda and in Burundi, and largely they sponsor it,' said one source in this Washington Post article. The US insists AMISOM is not the West’s proxy. 'AMISOM is an African peacekeeping force responding to an African crisis,' says the top US official on Somalia, James Swan.

A generation of leaders who won their spurs during Algeria's 1954-62 independence war against France remains in power, having defeated a violent challenge by armed Islamists in the 1990s and, at least for now, seen off the rebellious spirit that toppled Arab autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya last year. Among the old guard is President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 75, who has served three terms and is thought unlikely to seek a fourth, if only for undisclosed health reasons. But with a presidential election due in 2014 there is no clarity on who might take over Africa's biggest country, an OPEC oil producer which supplies a fifth of Europe's gas imports and cooperates with the West in combating al Qaeda-style militancy.

With the first-ever Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) report on the status of the Nile River, the situation between Egypt and Ethiopia and the angst between the two foes finally has some statistics and analysis to deal with. However, it is unlikely to see any changes in the current policies that have both countries eying future water resources along the world’s longest river. Top Ethiopia government officials have told Bikyamasr.com that they are looking at jumpstarting the massive Renaissance Dam project along the Nile River in an effort to increase water resources and energy for the East African country. The move could threaten the regional stability.

Janet Otieno, a Nairobi-based journalist, writes that xenophobia seems to be steadily taking root in Africa’s newest nation, as the hosts growingly perceive foreigners are encroaching on their territory and taking up their jobs. Even humanitarian workers are not spared in a country where civilians still possess firearms given proper disarmament is yet to be carried out since a bloody civil war ended.

This analysis of the Constitutional Draft seeks to examine the document from the perspective of what it provides in terms of protection and/or advancement of women’s rights and position in Zimbabwean society. The analysis will address both the process leading up to the compilation of the Constitutional Draft as well as its contents.

The latest IMF World Economic Outlook is causing quite a stir, states this article. It contains a three page text box basically saying that the IMF, together with other international institutions such as the OECD and the European Commission, has heavily underestimated the impact of fiscal austerity on economic activity. By thinking that fiscal cuts would only have a relatively minor impact on economic activity, governments were given bad advice and were pushed into policies administering overdoses of austerity.

The International Criminal Court pleaded for stronger support from the UN Security Council on to ensure states cooperate with its war crimes inquiries, complaining it had faced problems in cases on Darfur and Libya. International Criminal Court President Judge Sang-Hyun Song said the court's followup to the only two cases referred to it by the Security Council had been problematic and that some countries had refused to cooperate.