In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

The recent rush to acquire farmland in order to meet rising global demands for food and fuel is putting African countries at risk of bearing the social, economic, and environmental costs of global resource scarcity, says a new study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Many of these costs threaten to arise from the rising direct competition between established land uses and plantation monoculture. At the local level, this can be manifested in environmental degradation, loss of access to socially and economically valuable land resources, and conflicts between subsistence and commercial agriculture.

In just one week the city of St. Petersburg could pass an outrageous bill that will make it a crime to read, write, speak or meet to discuss anything considered 'Gay'. St. Petersburg is one of Russia's number one tourist destinations. That's why an international storm of bad publicity will force the Governor to think twice about the cost of signing this bill. This campaign on is calling for your signature to protest against the bill.

has launched an 'events' listing. This listing -http://farmlandgrab.org/events - allows you to publish and browse short notices about events related to land grabbing and what people are doing about it. These may be investor summits, film screenings, mobilisations, rallies, conferences, workshops, fact-finding missions or other. 'We hope this new feature will be particularly useful to activists and social movements who are struggling to stop land grabbing all over the world.'

Victims of environmental disasters or other abuses inflicted by corporations in Nigeria are being denied justice as they are too poor or do not know how to seek legal recourse, jurists say. 'Poor rural victims of corporate human rights abuse are usually unaware of their legal rights and don't have the financial resources to file court process, gather information and evidence, and afford legal services,' said Carlos Lopez, the International Commission of Jurists' senior legal advisor in a report.

It's not only money and military power that count in this world. Popular mobilisation can transform societies from below and it can strengthen states against private and imperial interests.

An interesting survey from Greek survey organisation Public Issue shows that in 2011 one third of the population agreed that 'Our society must change radically through revolution'. Only one per cent surveyed agreed that 'our society is fine the way it is.

This Committee to Protect Journalists page looks at attacks on the press in 2011, shown on a global map and with accompanying articles on censorship, internet restrictions, sexual violence, impunity and imprisonments.

Education in Nigeria is in crisis following years of underfunding. And private universities that have mushroomed to meet the growing need for higher education have become so commercialised many of them are no better than glorified high schools.

The power imbalances underpinning the structural layout of public worlds have reflected economic inequalities in areas characterised by those lacking political capital.In Zimbabwe, the scene is ripe for private waste sanitation companies or toilet capitalists.

A new book scrutinises the labour structure of the South African mining industry over the last 350 years.

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

This edition deals with the housing crisis and includes the following articles:
- The Neoliberal Project, Privatisation and the Housing Crisis
- Housing Associations: Privatisation Via Not-For-Profits
- Housing Profiteers and their Facilitators & Company Profile: Grainger
- Homelessness: Who profits from destitution?
- The Return of Class War Conservatism: the Realities of Housing in the ‘Big Society'
- Housing Benefit Cuts: Educate, Agitate, Organise!
- Anti-Squat Security Companies: Protection by Occupation?
- The Criminalisation of Squatting
- Alternatives: Housing Co-ops & Case Study: Phoenix Co-op
- Campaign Spotlight: SQUASH

Visit for more information.

Nearly everything President Zuma and the big corporates are doing places short-term demands above long-term thinking, both in the marketplace and at the polling place, promoting unfairness and exclusion, and thus preventing lasting prosperity and stability.

The South Centre organised a workshop at the beginning of February on the state of the global economy, and reflection on recent and future multilateral negotiations. The workshop provided a forum at the beginning of 2012 for policy makers, diplomats and experts of developing countries to reflect on the state of the global economy and prospects for developing countries, and on the implications of important multilateral negotiations that have recent taken place, and that will take place this year. Documents presented at the workshop and available from the South Centre website include:
- The Staggering Rise of the South By Y?lmaz Akyüz, Special Economic Advisor, South Centre
- Instability and Downturn in the World Economy and the Prospects of the South", Statement by Petko Draganov, the Deputy Secretary-General, UNCTAD
- EPA Negotiations between EU and Africa, by Aileen Kwa, Coordinator, Trade and Development Programe, South Centre.

The International Detention Coalition (IDC) has made a submission to the UN Special Rapporteur concerning a report on the issue of immigration detention. The report draws from global research and consultations undertaken by the IDC and focuses on the international trends emerging in the use and impact of immigration detention, the legal standards relating to the detention of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, as well as alternatives to immigration detention.

reports on the history of the unmanned drone in US assassinations. 'It was ten years ago this month, on February 4, 2002, that the CIA first used an unmanned Predator drone in a targeted killing. The strike was in Paktia province in Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. The intended target was Osama bin Laden, or at least someone in the CIA had thought so. Donald Rumsfeld later explained, using the passive voice of government: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” The Pentagon media pool began asking questions, and so the long decade of the drone began.'

In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

At a waterlogged gold mine in western Kenya’s Migori District, 14-year-old Jacob*, one of 15,000 children toiling in the region’s pits, scours the water for glistering flakes, a job he says beats going to school on an empty stomach. An estimated 15,000 children are working in gold mines in the districts of Nyatike and Migori in western Kenya’s Nyanza province, either in actual extraction or in ancillary services such as selling food, according to the local Children’s Welfare Office. This number rises significantly at weekends and during school holidays.

The UN recognises the international community’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) civilians during conflict, and this philosophy has quickly become embedded in peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions, but a new report questions some basic humanitarian assumptions. The reality - reinforced by a new study from the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) entitled 'Local to Global Protection in Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, South Sudan and Zimbabwe' - is that in conflicts and crisis people almost always have to provide their own protection, for themselves, their families and their villages.