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...

US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has begun long-awaited compensation payments to families over a 1996 drug trial blamed for the deaths of 11 children and disabilities in dozens of others. But the payments were initially distributed only to four families, while some 200 children participated in the trial of meningitis drug, Trovan. Parents of four of the children who died as a result of the trial received cheques of $175,000 each at a reception in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, where the trial took place.

Conservationists in Uganda have vowed to tackle President Yoweri Museveni head-on over his renewed plan to push through a proposal to give away part of Mabira Forest for sugar cane growing. Addressing district leaders and agriculturalists at Entebbe State House on Saturday, President Museveni said failure to give away the forest in 2007, is partly to blame for the current sugar crisis in the country. However, in what might lead to a repeat of the 2007 protests against the proposed give-away in which three people were killed, activists and politicians have condemned the President’s latest move and vowed to fight to save the forest.

In 'Climate loan sharks', the World Development Movement and the Jubilee Debt Campaign reveal that the UK is pushing $1.1 billion of climate loans, via the World Bank, on some of the poorest countries in the world. For example Grenada’s debt is already 90 per cent of GDP, yet it is to be lent a further $22 million, over 3 per cent of the country’s GDP. Lending to such debt burdened country is at best irresponsible and at worst willfully dangerous.

The Mawingu camp for internally displaced persons affected by Kenya’s 2007- 2008 post-election violence is a desolate place. Located in the Rift Valley, the camp is a collection of tattered, sagging and forlorn tents. Save for the 120 children crammed in a room shouting in unison during an English lesson, there is no other sign of life. Many of those who live here left early in the morning to look for menial jobs. If they are lucky they will earn Shs 100 (one dollar) for a day’s work.

Authorities in Kano, Nigeria, recently announced people would be jailed or fined for refusing to immunize their children against polio, as cases increase in the northern state, but it is unclear whether this approach is working. Nigeria, one of four countries that remain polio-endemic, has historically been 'a global epicentre of transmission', according to Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesman for the World Health Organisation’s polio eradication group. Twenty-four polio cases were reported in Nigeria between 1 January and 27 July 2011, compared to six during the same period last year.

The situation for women and children in Somalia remains precarious, humanitarian workers warn. According to Janusz Czerniejewski, head of Intersos at the Kenya and Somalia Mission, conflict over scarce resources increases during drought, putting women and children at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence. 'As they flee Somalia to safety, women and children are passing through areas where armed groups and bandits roam, only to arrive in crowded and potentially dangerous camps. The protection aspects of this crisis are acute and life-threatening. Gender-based violence (GBV) like rape, domestic violence and female genital mutilation is a significant issue in all parts of Somalia,' he told IPS.

WHO WOULD DARE BELIEVE IN THE WITHDRAWAL OF FRENCH COLONIAL TROOPS FROM CHAD?
Ley-Ngardigal Djimadoum

When Idriss Déby was being installed for a fourth term of five as president, France's vague attempts to put an end to its military presence in Chad sounded like a mere bluff. The context of regional geopolitical issues do not favour such an eventuality, not for Paris or the Chadian president. In this regard, Ley-Ngardigal Djimadoum underlines that the requirements of francophone Africa as well as the ‘culture of colonial serfdom’ are still perennial occurrences on both sides.

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JUSTICE FOR SANKARA: HOMAGE AND TRIBUTE

On 10 June 2011, some 21 French parliamentarians lodged an inquiry into the assassination of Thomas Sankara. Twenty-four years after the assassination of the former president of Burkina Faso, this move in search of truth fosters a long-lived symbol in the minds of resistance fighters in Africa and in the world. On 1 July, a dinner with the theme ‘Justice for Sankara, Justice for Africa’ was organised in Paris. Pambazuka brings to you a few short speeches that were made on the occasion of this ceremony which brought together more than a hundred personalities, celebrities, trade unionists, intellectuals and politicians.

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SENEGAL: THE ORIGINS OF IRRENDENTISM IN CASAMANCE
Amady Aly Dieng

Here is a book which immerses the reader into the heart of the Casamance drama. In this publication, which is a result of several years of investigations and research, Oumar Diatta, a specialist educationalist and journalist, tackles the Casamance question on the triple plan – political, institutional and administrative – since the colonial era and in the light of the conflict borne of the freedom fighter demands of the Movement of Democratic Forces in Casamance (Mfdc).

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SEEING SOCIAL MEDIA PROCESSES AS A MEDIUM FOR COMMUNICATION
Pierre Georges

This contribution relates to the connection between the alternatives, media citizens and the process of social forums which have developed during the last ten last years all over the planet. Pierre Georges presents the worldwide social forum as a ‘potentially powerful medium’ and presents the articulations which can help make it a ‘collective media’.

The West African coastline has seen increasing attacks on chemical and oil tankers. London-based Lloyd's Market Association, an umbrella group of insurers, recently listed Nigeria, Benin and surrounding waters in the same category as Somalia, where two decades of war and anarchy have allowed piracy to flourish.

HIV-positive civil servants in Malawi are unhappy with the government's announcement that it would stop providing a cash grant to help improve their diet. In June, the government said the scheme would be stopped and replaced with food packages. According to Mary Shawa, principal secretary in the office of the President and Cabinet responsible for HIV/AIDS and nutrition programmes, the cash grant programme 'was grossly abused, with hundreds of workers claiming to have HIV in order to cash in on the payment'.

Undeterred by police warnings, the opposition have said they are resuming nationwide protests to express their dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the high and rising cost of living in the country. Masaka Municipality MP and national coordinator of Activists for Change pressure group, which is leading the protests, Mr Mathias Mpuuga, said that protesters would only bow to police attempts to stop their plans if police quoted the specific law empowering it to prevent them from exercising their constitutional right to hold a peaceful demonstration.

This blog article tackles the issue of how to end conflict in the DRC. 'Ending the world's deadliest conflict is no easy task, but a growing consensus of Congolese civil society, electronics and metals companies, investors, and governments are now taking action to do so. A chief driver of their work is the Dodd-Frank legislation on conflict minerals, which is why a coalition of 40 Congolese human rights groups called it "the leverage needed to instill and impose ethical business practices in the Great Lakes region."'

ZANU PF has strongly denied the existence of torture camps near the controversial Chiadzwa diamond fields, after video evidence of the ongoing abuses by the military there was released. The UK’s BBC Panorama investigative series has revealed that the camps have been operational in the Marange region for the last three years, and the explosive report shows how civilians are subject to severe beatings and sexual attacks. But Mines Minister Obert Mpofu has denied the camps exist, calling it 'cheap propaganda from the BBC'.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), Navi Pillay, said that 'an estimated 370 million indigenous people' globally have lost or face the threat of losing their ancestral lands and natural resources due to 'unjust exploitation for the sake of development', PANA reported. According to UNHCR, when indigenous communities are alienated from their lands because of development and natural resource extraction projects, they are often left to scrape an existence on the margins of society.

There is no bi-lateral agreement between South Africa and Zimbabwe to prevent refugees from the famine-wracked Horn of Africa entering South Africa, said state officials last week. The statements from the South African department of Home Affairs and the Zimbabwean Ministry of Foreign Affairs this week are in direct contrast to statements appearing on the South African Home Affairs website, and Zimbabwean news reports on Zimbabwe’s decision to bar entry to Somali and Ethiopian refugees.

Joseph Kaute, the 43-year-old gay Cameroonian who was due to be deported from the UK, is back at Harmondsworth detention centre, thanks to Air France, the airline that was due to fly him from Heathrow back to Yaoundé via Paris. It was the third attempt to deport him. 'Air France refused to allow me to board,' Mr. Kaute told UK Gay News.

The Institute for Race Relations in the United Kingdom reports on prisoner transfer agreements between the UK and other countries. 'For the past few years, under pressure from right-wing Tories, the government has made strenuous attempts to reach agreements with countries such as Nigeria to enable prisoners serving sentences here to be compulsorily repatriated to complete their sentences in their home countries, so as to save costs, reduce the foreign national prisoner (FNP) population and make space for British prisoners.'

The New York Times profiles the use of private US military contractors in the war in Somalia, introducing the story with Richard Rouget, whom they describe as 'a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict'. The story goes on: 'Rouget, 51, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coast’s civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts. Now Mr. Rouget works for Bancroft Global Development, an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops who have fought a pitched urban battle in the ruins of this city against the Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with Al Qaeda.'

A sign of cordial relations between Rwanda and Uganda?

This video posted on Youtube provides a simple explanation of the US debt crisis and why it spells disaster for the global economy. What the world is facing, says the video, is complete global economic collapse, something that has never happened before. And it's not a matter of if it will happen, but when.