Delays in drug registration by the country's Medicines Control Council (MCC), contribute to depriving South African HIV patients of important fixed dose combination antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. But there are indications that the effects of the delays are being felt even farther afield.

The World Economic Forum became a platform this year for bankers to seek to re-assert their traditional power. And once again, it became a forum - in contrast and even opposition to the World Social Forum due to begin in Senegalese capital Dakar next week — where the damaging effects of globalisation and the environmental consequences of unrestrained growth were pushed aside.

They chant, 'One people, one draft!' They raise the flag of unified, across-the- board army enlistment — students and veterans wearing scars of past wars from a few dozen mainstream Zionist civil society organisations and youth movements.

With political crises in Egypt and Tunisia overshadowing other issues in the Middle East, the appointment of billionaire Najib Mikati as Lebanon’s new prime minister is winning regional support in the hope that the change will minimize instability in yet another Arab country. Many questions are arising, however, about the formation of the new government and how much clout Hezbollah will have over it.

Spiralling violence against Central American migrants in Mexico has prompted legal reforms, diplomatic actions, and the creation of new mechanisms to protect citizens in this region.

A High Level Panel has been set up by the African Union to send a team of experts to Côte d'Ivoire and come up with a solution to the political impasse that would be binding on both incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and his rival for the presidency, Alassane Ouattara.

The southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo has not been spared the heavy rains that have fallen across Southern Africa; the water is welcome in this semi-arid part of the country, but the coming of the rainy season has provoked fresh memories of the 2008 cholera epidemic.

Delays in drug registration by the country's Medicines Control Council (MCC), contribute to depriving South African HIV patients of important fixed does combination antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. But there are indications that the effects of the delays are being felt even farther afield.

The growing presence of Chinese and Brazilian capital in Latin America's energy sector is facilitating the construction of hydroelectric complexes, but is also the fuelling nationalist stances that are adding to the environmental criticisms of those major projects.

One of the world's largest mining organisations, Barrick Gold, is in damage control this week following the release of a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report outlining longstanding incidents of sexual and physical violence at the company's Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) mine in Papua New Guinea.