Chad has launched a mass campaign to vaccinate nearly 2 million people against meningitis A, the primary cause of epidemic meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa. This is part of a multi-year immunization campaign covering the 25 countries of the African meningitis belt.

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The United Kingdom has been surprisingly silent about Nigeria’s harsh new laws targeting homosexuals. This would be the perfect situation for the British government to launch its much-heralded policy of cutting aid money to countries that discriminate against homosexuals, but so far British money to Nigeria keeps flowing, and British officials remain silent, writes Simon Allison for the Daily Maverick.

A Us drone has crashed in the island nation of Seychelles, an incident that comes just over a week after a US drone went down in Iran. The latest crash comes just hours after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base that houses troops assigned to a unit in the horn of Africa and is home to a fleet of drones assigned to fly over the horn of Africa and some areas in the Middle East.

Gambian lawyer Fatou Bensouda has been officially elected as the next chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and will become the first African to hold the top post at a time when the ICC is almost exclusively focused on the continent. Bensouda, who has served as deputy to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the outgoing ICC chief prosecutor, was the only candidate and unanimously chosen by the ICC's assembly of state parties at their annual meeting in New York. She had previously worked as a legal adviser at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania.

A new wave of HIV activism is rising in Swaziland as people living with HIV take to the streets in protest, many for the first time in their lives, over continued shortages of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Swaziland's deepening financial crisis is taking a toll on service delivery, and the country is experiencing an unprecedented number of protests over issues such as school closures and a lack of HIV treatment. While Africa's last absolute monarchy does not allow formal political opposition to operate, a new brand of HIV activism may be taking hold as anger mounts over a lack of ARVs.

Protesters from the DRC have accused President Zuma of complicity in what they allege is electoral fraud in the recent election in the restive country. Supporters of opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi believe South Africa acted at the behest of western interests who seek to keep incumbent President Joseph Kabila in power to protect international investments in the mineral-rich country, reports the Daily Maverick.

'Kill me, kill me, you people should just kill me,' an unidentified woman begged as she was being gang raped by five men while her ordeal was filmed with one of their mobile phones. The crime is believed to have taken place at a private off-campus hostel near Abia State University, Nigeria, in August 2011. The video of the rape, on the Internet, caught the attention of blogger Linda Ikeji. Her subsequent blogpost of the crime sparked widespread anger and debate in Nigeria and beyond, especially among bloggers, Twitter users and organisations such as the youth group EnoughisEnough Nigeria.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has said it would be an act of cowardice for him to retire ahead of elections expected to be held next year. Closing his party's annual conference, Mr Mugabe, 87, condemned the current power-sharing government as a 'monster' which should be buried. Resolutions were passed endorsing Mr Mugabe as candidate, in spite of reports he is suffering ill-health.

A new High-Level Taskforce on Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV for Eastern and Southern Africa was launched at the 16th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA). The Taskforce will engage in high-level political advocacy in support of accelerated country actions and monitoring the implementation of the draft Windhoek Declaration for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV.

Despite a range of progressive amendments made to the Protection of State Information Bill (widely known as the Secrecy Bill) over the past 18 months, the Right2Know campaign continues to be 'extremely concerned' about the broadness and harshness of criminal penalties contained in the Bill, and the lack of adequate protection for whistleblowers, journalists, and ordinary citizens. Their concerns are outlined in a letter sent to the Open Government Partnership at the beginning of December.

Billionaire businessman Natie Kirsh has endorsed the rule of King Mswati III of Swaziland and criticised efforts to democratise sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy. In reports published in the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer, Kirsh denied that King Mswati 'is an absolute monarch', and ignored the unrest in the country that gave him his start in business in the 1960s. 'I even lacked enough tissue to wipe my wife’s tears as she saw how the country has developed,' he said. Even as Kirsh spoke, Swaziland’s Minister of Finance, Majozi Sithole, reported that the cash-strapped government might not have enough money to pay civil servants this month. Swaziland Solidarity Network member Mumsi Thwala said Kirsh’s remarks at the royal village left her 'stunned, speechless and depressed. Kirsh owes his fortune to a cozy relationship with a dictatorial regime'.

Botswana President Ian Khama, an arch-critic of President Robert Mugabe, could be working on normalising relations with the octogenarian leader after he sent a delegation from his party to 'offer solidarity support' to Zanu PF at the just ended annual conference. Khama, who has openly clashed with Mugabe in the past, sent a delegation from his Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) to attend the Zanu PF conference. BDP secretary-general Thabo Fanu Masalila heaped praise on Mugabe urging Zanu PF members to back the ageing leader.

Malawi will review a series of controversial laws, including a ban on homosexual acts, Justice Minister Ephraim Chiume has said. Chiume said the review was in response to 'public opinion'. Western governments criticised Malawi last year for jailing a gay couple on sodomy charges.
On Tuesday last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US would use foreign aid to encourage countries to decriminalise homosexuality.

The dramatic changes to weather patterns as a result of climate change will have dire consequences for agriculture, the major source of food and income for Africa’s small-scale farmers, most of them women. Millions of people will be forced to migrate, seeking better environments to sustain themselves and their families as the land becomes unproductive. Not enough is being done in national adaptation strategies to acknowledge the different gender dimensions of climate change and migration.

Food prices, which increased by just 1 per cent last year, have increased by a whopping 10.6 per cent so far this year. Lower-income South Africans, who spend much more of their total earnings on food, are the biggest victims of this sharp increase in food-price inflation. According to the South African quarterly 'Food Price Monitor' report, produced by the National Agricultural Marketing Council, the cost of the standard Statistics South Africa food basket, expressed as a share of the average monthly income of the wealthiest 30 per cent of the population, is only 2.9 per cent. By contrast, this cost for the poorest 30 per cent of the population was a heavy 36.4 per cent in October.

US 'occupy' protesters claimed victory Monday 12 December in blockading ports along the West Coast and shutting down a major trade cargo hub in a new front on the anti-capitalist campaign. At least one port was fully closed down, while freight traffic was disrupted at several others including in Oakland, where thousands of demonstrators rallied after a day of action from California to Alaska.

Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the Refugee Rights Centre at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, on behalf of the Somali Association of South Africa (SASA) and the Project for Conflict Resolution and Development (PCRD) was granted an order 13 December 2011 in the Eastern Cape High Court in Port Elizabeth regarding the closure of the Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office. In terms of the order, an interim office at the regional immigration office must continue to provide asylum services to all holders of asylum seeker and refugee permits issued under the Refugees Act. The order also stipulates that no one whose permit expired between the period of 30 November 2011 and 14 December 2011 when the refugee office was non-functional will be subjected to a fine or any criminal sanction for the expiry of that permit.

There are currently 52 journalists imprisoned in Africa, in nine countries. More than half the jailed journalists are held in that scourge of media freedom - Eritrea. The most disturbing news to come out of Committee to Protect Journalist's recent report on journalists behind bars, is that the trend of imprisoning journalists - often on trumped-up charges – has seen a sharp increase over the last decade.

Two weeks of discussions at the 17th annual Conference of the Parties (COP17), which ran through Friday and Saturday nights, resulted in sleep-deprived negotiators attending numerous closed meetings and missing flights. These groups have been disappointed by the outcomes, and the consequences that will be shouldered by developing nations, especially those in Africa.
'Delaying real action until 2020 is a crime of global pro-portions,' said Nnimmo Bassey, chairman of Friends of the Earth International. 'An increase in global temperatures of 4ºC, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, small island states, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide. This summit has amplified climate apart-heid, whereby the richest 1 percent of the world have decided that it is acceptable to sacrifice the 99 percent.'