The US State Department's annual human rights report, released this week, charges that Ethiopia is holding several hundred political prisoners, including the leader of one of the country's largest opposition parties. The 2009 report says Birtukan Mideksa, president of Ethiopia's opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice party, was held in solitary confinement for the first six months of the year despite a court ruling that it violated her constitutional rights.

In its annual human rights country report, released March 11, the US State Department accuses Eritrea of systematically abusing human rights, as well as sponsoring terrorism in the Horn of Africa region, and acting as a source and conduit for arms to insurgents in Somalia. The report charges the Asmara government oversaw unlawful killings by its security forces last year; used arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture against opposition supporters; and severely restricted freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association and religion. Throughout 2009, "consistent and systemic gross human rights violations persisted unabated at the government's behest," the report said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment March 8 accusing a suspect brought to the US from Nigeria, Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—al-Shabab, the main insurgent army in Somalia. Ahmed, 35 of Eritrea, is also charged with providing that support, conspiring to receive training from a foreign terrorist organization, and receiving the training.

Hundreds were again killed over the weekend in ethnic violence around the city of Jos, in central Nigeria's Plateau State, with corpses dumped into hastily dug mass graves. Christian members of Plateau's leading ethnic group, the Beromas, were apparently by Muslim Fulani herdsmen, who swept into their villages, putting homes to the torch and attacking the residents with rifles and machetes as they fled. In a telephone interview with Britain's Channel 4 News , the Rev. Benjamin Kwashi, Anglican archbishop of Jos, said the attackers were "people who knew what to do and were trained on how to do it."

Togo's main opposition leader March 7 rejected the results of a presidential poll handing a second term to incumbent Faure Gnassingbe, as hundreds of activists rallied in the capital Lome to demand justice and police responded with tear gas. Gnassingbe was returned to office in the March 4 election, defeating his main rival Jean-Pierre Fabre who took 33%, according to official results. "I have never wanted to use violence, but if I am stolen from, I will not give up the fight," warned Fabre. "We are going to stage protests, we are not going to take this lying down." (AFP, March 6; AFP, March 7)

Despite good intentions, the push to privatize government functions and instate "free trade" policies has caused declining food production, increased poverty and a sparked a hunger crisis for millions of people in African nations, researchers conclude in a new study. Market reforms that began in the mid-1980s and were supposed to aid economic growth have actually backfired in some of the world's poorest nations, leading in recent years to multiple food riots, scientists reported Feb. 15 today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A Jan. 21 account from the pan-Latin American Matriz del Sur agency claiming that Somalia's pirates are seeking to send booty as aid to Haiti's earthquake victims has made an Internet splash, picked up by Venezuela's Aporrea and translated into English on Metamute. The report only uses the word "pirates" in quotes (prefaced with "so-called" on first reference), but the pirate leader who is quoted is not identified by name or organization. No alternative term for the pirates is offered.

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Feb. 3 reversed a Pre-Trial Chamber decision that denied the application for an arrest warrant on genocide charges against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. The reversal was procedural, and did not address the question of whether al-Bashir is responsible for genocide.