The Joint Task Force (JTF) in Borno State has disclosed that it killed 24 suspected Boko Haram members in different parts of Maiduguri metropolis on Monday night during series of encounters with its personnel. Similarly, no fewer than 25 persons were killed and properties worth millions of naira destroyed in a renewed attack by Fulani herdsmen against residents of Yogbo in Guma Local Government Area of Benue State on Sunday. Among those killed were children and women.

A Moroccan court has jailed an activist with the February 20 protest movement for 12 years for taking part in an unauthorised demonstration, a human rights group said, slamming the ruling as an act of vengeance. The charges against Bashir Benshaib, 32, who was sentenced by an appeals court in Al-Hoceima, included blocking a road, theft, aggression and drug dealing, Faisal Ousser of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) told AFP.

Love Mathobela was born in South Africa and has lived most of her life here, but she is not yet recognised as a citizen. 'I had a birth certificate and South African passport which my father had obtained for me using his forged South African identity documents he acquired when he came to South Africa 22 years ago. During the 2010 Special Dispensation for Zimbabwean Nationals, my father gave away his forged identity documents including mine as requested by the law.'

Raheli Philipo Kilaye is a Maasai woman. She lives in Longido, a village in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border. For many years, collecting and selling firewood was this 37-year-old woman’s only source of income. Every third day, she walked 12 hours to collect two bundles of firewood from the bush, which she would carry to town on her back to sell in the market. If she sold the firewood, she earned 3000 Tanzanian shillings, about two dollars. But this arduous and unrewarding work is now just a bad memory. A year ago Mrs. Kilaye enrolled in a school for adult learners in Longido, where she is studying English, Swahili and mathematics.

Clarisse Kimbi barely ekes out a living from a tiny parcel of land in Kom village in the North West Region of Cameroon. Today, the mother of six finds it hard to put food on the table for herself and her children. But five years ago she, her husband and children were considered well-off. In 2007, farming on five hectares of land, Kimbi could comfortably feed her family, and still have enough surplus food to sell. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, her family was counted among the wealthy. But things changed when her husband died five years ago. Almost everything was taken away from her and her children.

In this submission, ARTICLE 19 outlines its concerns that, over the last four years, there has been an escalation in violations of the right to freedom of expression and information, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in Djibouti.

Heavily armed men, believed to be state security agents, abducted two MDC-T officials in Bulawayo recently, torturing and interrogating them. They were released the next day. According to a statement from the party, Emanuel Kambarami and Andrew Vera were abducted from their homes in Mpopoma by five agents. Kambarami is the chairperson for Mpopoma, ward 9 constituency and Vera chairs the ward’s Youth Assembly.

An estimated 20 million people are alive today as a direct result of tuberculosis (TB) care and control, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report 2012. 'In the space of 17 years, 51 million people have been successfully treated and cared for according to WHO recommendations. Without that treatment, 20 million people would have died,' says Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department. 'This milestone reflects the commitment of governments to transform the fight against TB.'

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.

An Ebola outbreak that has killed several people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) appears to be slowing down, but health workers say there is a need for continued vigilance in order to contain the virus. 'Their last confirmed case was admitted in the MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières]/Ministry of Health Ebola ward on October 10, after two weeks with no confirmed cases,' Olimpia de la Rosa, MSF medical emergency coordinator, told IRIN in an email. 'The decrease in the number of admissions in our facility makes us think that we are on the way to contain the outbreak, but containment efforts must continue until no cases are confirmed for at least 21 days.'

With few career options, Sudanese women are increasingly building up their own businesses from scratch - earning themselves financial benefits and freedom. Many women are trying out their chances in the informal economy, which offers them flexible working hours as well as an opportunity to try out their creative new business ideas. Often their customers are women, especially educated or working women.

Tunisian journalists went on strike on Wednesday, after months of rising tensions with the Islamist-led government, which is accused of curbing press freedom and seeking to control public media groups. The strike was widely observed at those press groups at the heart of the controversy that has gripped Tunisia since the summer, with staff accusing the ruling coalition of manipulating editorial content by appointing loyal directors.

Uganda should deploy oil revenues to create universal old age pensions and universal health insurance to make a more humane society. This would be a real investment in the future of the nation. So says Dr. Ezra Suruma, Uganda’s former Minister of Finance, in this exclusive interview with Oil in Uganda. He accepts that it will be prudent to place some of the revenues in an Investment Fund - because too much money flowing too fast into the general budget would be difficult to absorb. But, he argues, all Ugandan citizens should become individual shareholders in the Investment Fund, in order to ensure that each and every citizen benefits directly through annual dividends - and also to create citizen-shareholder pressure for transparent and corruption-free management of the funds.

Riots erupted in Zanzibar’s Stone Town and Tanzania’s commercial city of Dar es Salaam Wednesday following the arrest and disappearance of Muslim clerics. According to information posted by the US Embassy in Tanzania on its website, there have been roadblocks, tyre burning, rock throwing and rioting in Darajani, Mbuyuni and Kisonge in Zanzibar following the disappearance of Sheikh Farid Haji.