Makerere University's College of Computing and Informatics Technology is trying to get its students to create solutions to real-life problems. On its website, the department praised one team, Cipher 256, for winning the Microsoft Imagine Cup (in the East and South Africa Region). Aaron Tushabe, Joshua Okello, and Josiah Kavuma make up the winning team. In July, they will travel to compete at the world cup finals in Sydney, Australia. Their college has won this honor for its students five times in a row.

The winning concept is a mobile phone device that can detect ectopic pregnancies in women and monitor the movements of the fetus inside the mother. The application can be used at home, since the user only needs a mobile phone to carry out the scan. Uganda has over 14 million mobile phone users; today, people have phones even in remote villages. The group took its inspiration from the UN Millennium Development Goals for cutting maternal mortality.

I'm excited about this innovation because it can potentially do a lot to detect complications during the early stages of pregnancy. By picking up on these sorts of problems early, mothers will have the time to contact a medical professional who can offer therapy. Maternal mortality rates in most African countries are still far too high, of course, and an innovation like this seems like a great way to reduce them. The application, which is called WinSenga, can be found on both facebook and twitter.

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In the run-up to Egypt's long-awaited presidential election, Magdy Samaan takes to the streets to find out what his compatriots are thinking about the political situation.

Jaime Suchlicki outlines the challenges that will face post-Castro Cuba and provides some handy tips on how to cope with them.

In his column, Christian Caryl concludes that the Russian protest movement presents little threat to Vladimir Putin's continued rule -- at least not yet.

Peter Passell offers a user-friendly overview of some of the latest research on economic transitions.

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"Smile before you hit" suddenly seems like perfectly good advice for men in uniform who, in Indonesia, still think they can get away with abusing their powers. These days, in a world increasingly dominated by social media, there is a chance that you will be caught on camera, and when that happens, you might as well make sure that you look good.

Last week a young man was attacked by an army captain on a busy Jakarta road. The officer thrashed his victim on the head with a baton while wielding a pistol in his other hand. The fight apparently started after their vehicles swiped one another during afternoon rush-hour traffic. The soldier was in civilian clothes, but what gave him away was not his car's army license plate or his buzz cut, but the arrogant display of power.

The whole thing was recorded in a two-minute video that went viral on YouTube last week. The video prompted a chorus of anger expressed through all forms of social media. The spontaneous public outcry indicated that this was not an isolated incident of abuse of power by the nation's security apparatus.

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Another day, another deeply damaging whistle-blowing by a former Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal magistrate. Soon after Magistrate Eladio Aponte fled the country last month and aired a terrifying amount of dirty chavista laundry on TV, his one-time colleague Luis Velásquez Alvaray (above) did him one better, releasing detailed evidence about a court system that looks more and more like a criminal conspiracy.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: To lose one Supreme Tribunal magistrate may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

Together, the back-to-back interviews (broadcast by the Miami-based, Venezuelan-exile owned TV channel SOiTV) paint a picture of a criminal justice system deep in bed with the Colombian Rebel Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas, where political interference, crooked rulings, collusion with drug traffickers, and occasional contract killings, are entirely routine. The cocaine route out of Colombia, through Venezuela, and on to the U.S. and Western Europe is simply too profitable -- and the tentacles of the trade's millions have seeped into every corner of the system.

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When South Sudan became the world's youngest nation in 2011, we greeted it with excitement. Decades of warfare were finally over. We praised Sudan for allowing the South to go, and we praised President Omar Al-Bashir for handling the separation calmly, despite losing the country's oil sources.

For Uganda, the successful peace talks and the creation of a new state meant that the Sudanese refugees long residing in refugee camps in Uganda would soon return home. (The photo above shows refugees returning to South Sudan from Uganda last year.)  Most importantly, it meant that Khartoum would end the support it had been giving Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Since the 2006 peace talks (initiated by Riek Machar, the current vice president of South Sudan), northern Uganda has seen relative peace.

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When President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leaves office in 2014, one legacy he hopes to leave behind is an Indonesia that is truly committed to upholding and observing human rights, now fully enshrined in the nation's constitution.

His chief legal advisor, Albert Hasibuan, recently disclosed that the president has asked a team to prepare the text of a formal public apology for all the human rights violations that the state has committed against its own citizens. While he did not give any specific details, Hasibuan said the apology, to be issued before 2014, would cover all the tragic events in which the state was the main perpetrator, going as far back as the 1960s.

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Mohamed Fadel Fahmy interviews Robert Becker, who decided to stay in Egypt and have his day in court rather than leave the country with the other Americans implicated in the NGO affair.

Francisco Martin-Rayo argues that America is undermining Yemen's opportunity to build democracy for the sake of waging war on Al Qaeda. (The photo above shows Yemeni jihadis manning a checkpoint.)

Reporting from The Hague, Christopher Stephen explains why the welcome verdict against Charles Taylor shouldn't divert attention from the continuing irrelevance of the International Criminal Court.

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The probability that Hugo Chávez may soon leave the political stage is increasing. Which member of his movement is poised to lead it?

Information on Hugo Chávez's health over the past year has been heavy on innuendo and short on fact. But in recent weeks, Chávez has virtually disappeared from the public airwaves, which suggests that his condition is serious. During his rare public appearances, he appeared sickly and unwell. On two recent occasions, he broke down and cried while pleading for his life.

In short, this is a very sick man who may not have much longer to live. The question that begs asking, then, is who can lead the chavista movement in the post-Chávez years?

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