Twitter has announced a new partnership with major satellite providers to give their subscribers access to Twitter SMS, the original text-based Twitter service. According to a statement, the company has partnered with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s two largest satellite providers, to increase the number of people that can use Twitter SMS worldwide. The company said the new partnership will help guarantee greater global access to the microblogging network.

Mining companies' branding of themselves as bringers of development needs to be critically examined against the burgeoning 'resource curse' literature that links mining to deepening national impoverishment in mining-dependent developing countries

South African recipients of money from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) have pleaded with the health minister to intervene as they continue to wait for overdue funds. Failure to do so will see several programmes closing and people losing their jobs. The groups, including Soul City and the Treatment Action Campaign, were due to receive payments from the Global Fund in July 2011 and January 2012 as part of Round 6. None have materialised.

Top African copper producer Zambia plans to audit all its mining houses in a bid to dig for back taxes of up to $1 billion it estimates it is owed, its mines minister said. Such a policy by the government of populist president Michael Sata would widen an initiative launched by the previous administration and comes against the backdrop of a surge of resource nationalism across Africa and Zambia's own doubling of copper royalties to six per cent.

The Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues is governed by Mauritius, but it's inhabitants yearn for self-governance. How much longer will they have to wait?

The TAC and SECTION27 have sent an open letter to the High Commissioner to India for South Africa to highlight their urgent concerns with final negotiations for the EU-India Free Trade Agreement. They are concerned about provisions for the scale up of intellectual property, pushed by the European Union, in an impending EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the impact of these provisions on the health of people across the developing world.

Australian and Brazilian mining giants are moving villagers to land insufficient for farming and far from jobs to make way for coal projects in central Mozambique, and then sidelining local entrepreneurs as they exploit the region's natural resources, according to a new report. The independent Southern Africa Resource Watch, which monitors the impact of mining across the region, sent researchers to study resettlement efforts by Rio Tinto of Australia and Vale of Brazil, which recently began mining in Mozambique's Tete province. Southern Africa Resource Watch said 'the impact of both companies' investment on local communities remains problematic and there is no guarantee that these massive coal extraction projects are going to genuinely benefit the people of Mozambique.'

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...

More than a billion people in the world still lack access to electricity, while another one billion have unreliable access stalling efforts for improving health, livelihoods and conserve the environment. Findings from a new research published by the Worldwatch Institute (WI) urge governments and development organisations to invest in electrification to achieve critical health, environmental, and livelihood outcomes, a statement released by the Institute said.

The UNAIDS Reference Group on HIV and Human Rights has released an independent statement in response to the crisis facing the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. It states: 'The November 2011 announcement of the cancellation of the 11th round of funding of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria because of the Fund’s financial difficulties presents the international community with both a health and a human rights crisis. Since its first round of funding in 2002, the Global Fund has played an indispensable role in advancing the health and human rights goals of the global HIV response. The Global Fund’s financial difficulties are part of a broader global HIV funding crisis.'

IMF held up Tunisia under Ben Ali as a model, yet ordinary people fed up with his excesses overthrew the regime. Now IMF appears to be courting the new leadership.

Meet the Davos Man in this article and hear about the same old song being played at the recent World Economic Forum. With global retrenchments and a Eurozone in crisis, was system change a subject for debate. '...the system, as we know by now, is one designed so very carefully for the benefit of the 1 per cent. So things like, for example, prosecuting financial fraud, redesigning incentives for corporate predation, and, well, reining in a capitalist system that is sucking the world's real economy dry, are just not on the table.'

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.

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.

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...

Even as the Occupy movement recedes in size, if not in activism, in the global North, it has, to its own surprise, opened up a new front in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria - where tens of thousands have occupied and paralysed the economy in a protest against the lifting of oil subsidies. The Arab Spring is moving south, thanks to #OccupyNigeria. If nothing else, this movement dramatises the global nature of the new wave of Occupy protests.

Corporate Watch has announced the publication of a clear and concise, 24-page 'Nuts & Bolts' Guide to the ins and outs of the financial sector. From hedge funds to the money markets and derivatives, all of the major players and products are broken down from a critical perspective.

Who are the global 1%? What companies do they run? How do they escape accountability? Check out the Transnational Institute's powerful infographic displays that expose the social and environmental costs of global corporate power. TNI, as part of its new Corporate Power project, is producing a series of infographics over 2012 that expose the reality of corporate power, and our need to fundamentally change direction. Download and share these infographics, and watch out for new ones over the coming months.

Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta distributed close to Sh50 million to mobilise and arm attackers during the post-election violence, according to the ruling of ICC judges. The money was released in instalments through three former MPs from Kiambu and Nakuru counties and former Mungiki leader Maina Njenga. In the ruling delivered on Monday 23 January, the judges pieced together events leading to the revenge attacks on ODM supporters in Naivasha and Nakuru by Mungiki members, who were said to be supporters of the rival Party of National Unity (PNU).

China and Japan have taken a decisive step to diversify their reserve holdings away from the dollar. African peoples have a lot of lessons to learn from both the capitalist crisis in Europe and this new financial arrangement.