Right at the bottom of the pyramid are phone users who can’t afford the minimum cost for a SIM to share in someone else’s phone, writes Russell Southwood from Balancing Act. Movirtu has produced a cloud-based, login account which will enable anyone who has access to a GSM phone to share it but still retain their own number. The product was being tested in 2010 and started being deployed as a pilot with several operators in Africa.

As protests mount over fraud in Kenya’s Ministry of Education, Henry Maina discusses the investigation and proposes lessons to be learned.

Zimbabwean police Wednesday (29 June) arrested an editor and a journalist from a privately owned newspaper for reporting on the arrest of an ally of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Nevanji Madanhire, the editor of The Standard newspaper, and Patience Nyangove, a reporter, were picked up by detectives at the paper’s offices in central Harare. A manager of the parent company – Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) – was also arrested.

Egypt's government has announced an ambitious plan for a tenfold increase in spending on scientific research within the next three years, at an event where the prime minister declared science as a top priority. It plans to raise the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on scientific research from 0.23 per cent to two per cent. But critics say this is too much, too fast.

A police officer and two others have been arrested as suspects in the stabbing death of journalist Ibrahim Foday of 'The Exclusive' newspaper near Freetown, Sierra Leone, say the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Foday was beaten and stabbed on 12 June in the east of the capital while covering clashes between neighbouring villages Kossoh and Grafton over a piece of land, report the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and other IFEX members.

Nearly 70 journalists were forced into exile over the past 12 months, with more than half coming from Iran and Cuba, says a new survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The report is just one of the ways IFEX members marked World Refugee Day on 20 June. Eighty-two per cent of journalists left their home countries between 1 June 2010 and 31 May 2011 because of imprisonment, or the threat of being jailed, says CPJ. Another 15 per cent fled following physical attacks or threats of violence.

The Right2Know campaign has welcomed the ANC's concessions on the Protection of Information Bill (the Secrecy Bill). 'It is a first, but important step, which may signal a willingness by democrats within Parliament and government to push back against an apparent grab for power by securocrats within the state. This would have been impossible without the voice of ordinary South Africans who have led the struggle for the Right2Know campaign over the past year.'

Hacktivist group Anonymous says it has dumped onto the web data that it claims was taken from the government servers of several countries. The group indicated this was part of its AntiSec operation, a move to steal data from governments it did not agree with. In a message on its Twitter account, Anonymous claimed to dump data from 'Anguilla, Brazil, Zimbabwe and Australian Government Servers.' Anonymous said it started with the userbase of Zimbabwe, which it said was 'rather small'.

The latest issue of the Biowatch Bulletin is out and includes the following:
- Planned US control of SA seed supply threatens food security
- SA GM update
- Biowatch comments on SA's climate change response Green paper
- World Social Forum, COP 17 and other events
- Agro-ecology - workshops and trainings
Visit for more information.

'Handbook for Local Journalists in Crisis Areas' is a practical guide for journalists in crisis areas, which is based on the wide experience of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in training and working with journalists in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The handbook teaches international reporting standards, explaining the journalistic process clearly, from subject choice to final editing. The modules are enhanced with examples and extracts from previously published IWPR stories from around the world.

Ethiopian authorities have been holding a newspaper columnist incommunicado since Tuesday (21 June), local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists. Reeyot Alemu, a regular contributor to the independent weekly Feteh, was expected to spend the next four weeks in preventive detention under what appears to be Ethiopia's sweeping anti-terrorism law.

WIPO Director General Francis Gurry has announced a project to build a common digital platform which will help streamline the identification of protected musical works across 11 West African countries, helping creators from these countries get paid for their work through a simplified and standardised rights registration system. US firm Google will be WIPO’s technology partner in developing this new web-based system, which builds upon WIPOCOS (WIPO Software for Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights).

Reporters Without Borders says it is deeply saddened by the murder of Kambale Musonia, a journalist working for Radio Communautaire de Lubero Sud in Kirumba, in the eastern province of Nord-Kivu. Aged 29, Musonia was shot three times in the chest at close range by three unidentified men who were waiting for him outside his home as he returned from work.

Reporters Without Borders says it is relieved to learn that six contributors to opposition radio station La Voix de Djibouti – Farah Abadid Hildid, Houssein Ahmed Farah, Houssein Robleh Dabar, Abdillahi Aden Ali, Moustapha Abdourahman Houssein and Mohamed Ibrahim Waïss – have been released after more than four months in Djibouti’s Gabode prison. After several appeals to Djibouti’s supreme court, an appeal court ruled on 22 June that they should be released conditionally and placed under judicial control pending trial.

The African National Congress (ANC) bowed to pressure on the Protection of Information Bill and promised major concessions to bring the legislation in line with the Constitution. The ruling party agreed to restrict the power to classify, which it had previously sought to extend to all organs of state, to bodies dealing directly with security and to scrap mandatory prison sentences for leaking secret information.

Reporters Without Borders visited eastern Libya in April to evaluate the situation of the media in Benghazi and the surrounding region and, in particular, to report on the extraordinary vigour of the new media that have been emerging in this part of the country since its liberation from Muammar Gaddafi’s oppressive rule. 'The current media are essentially citizen media consisting of young activists who have played a key role in the war, activists such as Mohamed Al-Nabbous, the creator of the Web TV Libya Al-Hurra, who was killed by a sniper on 19 March,' Reporters Without Borders said.

If Tunisians are to play an informed part in the transition phase and beyond, they need a free and independent media and a strong, democratic and open civil society to hold power to account, according to a new report published by the 21 members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange -Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), including ARTICLE 19. 'The Scars of Oppression Run Deep: Assessing the Critical Requirements for Freedom of Expression in Tunisia’s Democratic Transition' report was released on 16 June, 2011 to national and international media as well as local civil society groups at a press conference held in Tunis. It provides a sample of opinions gathered from a broad
cross-section of over 60 media professionals, civil society advocates and authorities interviewed in Tunisia during the course of a mission that took place from 9 to 16 April.

As one way of updating one another on latest fuel supplies at gas stations, Malawians are using Facebook in advising where they can fill up their tanks. Over 210 subscribers share updates on an open group called Malawi Fuel Watch, reports Global Voices. Malawians have been queuing up for hours for fuel since last year.

Former ANC minister Kader Asmal has come out against South Africa's controversial Protection of Information Bill. In a letter to the Right2Know campaign, Asmal wrote that: 'This Bill is so deeply flawed that tinkering with its preamble or accepting a minor change here or there will not alter its fundamental nature, that it does not pay sufficient attention to the nature of freedom of expression.'

Nato is using information gleaned from Twitter to help analysts judge which sites could be targeted by commanders for bombing and missile strikes in Libya. Potentially relevant tweets are fed into an intelligence pool then filtered for relevance and authenticity, and are never passed on without proper corroboration. However, without 'boots on the ground' to guide commanders, officials admit that Twitter is now part of the overall 'intelligence picture'.