In a new report launched today, the liberal group Political Research Associates (PRA) documents the role of U.S. right-wing evangelicals and religious institutions in fostering homophobia in several countries in Africa. With data from seven countries (Uganda, Liberia, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Nigeria), the report exposes the impact of U.S. conservatives on policies toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as reproductive rights. This latest report builds on PRA's earlier research on the issue.

The report argues that the culture wars between pro-life and pro-choice groups within the U.S. have been exported to Africa. Homophobia has connected different Christian denominations which are usually suspicious of one another, such as Evangelicals uniting with Catholics and Mormons who promote a "pro-family" agenda.

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There's a revolt in the making in Sudan. (You can track it on Twitter at #SudanRevolts, and take a look here and here for background.)

You'd think it would catch the world's attention. The revolt is being led by an educated, young, polyglot class of people attempting to spread the message in half a dozen languages. Media-savvy bloggers and activists are being arrested; internet campaigns to free them are launched every day (in Arabic and English). Foreign journalists are being detained and deported. The protestors are confronting a military-religious dictatorship with demands for a civil state and social and economic justice. And, unlike some of the other worst offenders in Africa, the ruling regime is at least somewhat familiar to the western public thanks to coverage of the atrocities in Darfur and South Sudan (not to mention the involvement of George Clooney and company and the International Criminal Court's first arrest warrant -- as yet futile -- for an acting head of state).

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Sectarian violence in the western region of Burma that shares a long border with Bangladesh has now claimed at least 25 lives since Friday. President Thein Sein has declared an emergency in Arakan State, where a feud between ethnic Arakan Buddhists against stateless Rohingya Muslims has spiraled into full-blown communal violence. The looting, arson, and mob clashes are spreading fast.

Although a predominantly Buddhist state, Arakan is home to a large number of Muslims, including the estimated 800,000 Rohingya, who are regarded by the Burmese government as stateless illegal aliens. The United Nations has described them as one of the world's most persecuted minorities. However, many Burmese call them "Bengalis," or even use a racial slur, kalar, a derogatory term for foreigners, especially those of Indian appearance.

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Oh. Dear. God.

That was my first reaction when I saw this new ad broadcast on a government satellite channel:

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Traffic in Caracas -- which is chaotic at the best of times -- ground to a virtual standstill today as authorities were forced to shut down the main east-west highway crossing the length of the long and narrow city. The reason? Gunfire. Not just any gunfire, but assault rifle fire and sporadic grenades traded between the security forces and the heavily armed inmates at the notorious La Planta prison, which sits next to the highway just off of downtown.

Stories about conditions in Venezuelan prisons often have an other-worldly, Mad Max feel to them; with nearly 50,000 inmates crammed into jails built to hold 12,500, overcrowding in Venezuelan jails is cinematographic in scale. Overwhelmed by the number of people, prison guards long ago gave up trying to control what happens inside, limiting themselves to guarding the perimeter to prevent breakouts. The result is a Hobbesian state of nature inside the prison, a never-ending war of all against all that left 560 inmates dead last year.

Making things worse is the rampant corruption of prison authorities, who make a profitable trade selling anything you can think of to the inmates: marihuana, handguns, stereos, assault rifles, blackberries, girls, waterbeds, DVD players, cocaine, laptops, even military-grade grenades. Anything you can think of, you can smuggle into a Venezuelan jail -- at a price.

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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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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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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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This week Indonesia was gripped by the appearance of a now-infamous one-minute sex clip that appeared on the Internet. House of Representatives member Muhammad Prakosa must have watched it over and over again: As head of the House's Ethics Council, it's his job to decide whether the man and woman in the video are his fellow honorable members of parliament, as many are claiming.

The Council has yet to announce its finding. Prakoso says he will meet with the two alleged MPs first. This won't happen until the end of recess and the House resumes on May 13. If indeed the two MPs are the couple in the video, they will be fired.

In the meantime, the political rumor mill is already busy. Fingers are pointing at the two representatives from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the country's main opposition party. Last month, the party blocked the government's plan to increase domestic fuel prices.

The way the story has been played up by the website that posted the video suggests a political motive aimed not only at discrediting the PDI-P, but also at destroying the careers of the two politicians. Somehow the video clip managed to slip past the Internet censor -- despite the government's efforts to scrub pornographic materials from the Internet.

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Last Wednesday, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people took over Habib Bourguiba Avenue, Tunisia's revolutionary epicenter. Not to protest the prime minister and his assembly, and not to make political claims of any kind. They weren't carrying banners, but books. It was an odd sort of protest. People of all ages (though mostly young) sat on benches, on steps, under trees -- and read. They were reading novels, comic books, political books, philosophy essays, and newspapers. The youngest, 4-year-old Laila, had a coloring book: Quite the young star, she didn't skip a beat (or color outside of the line) as others took photos of her all day long.

All of them had answered a call for an event simply called "The Street Reads," which invited people to join "the first silent protest on the avenue, with no political claims; just to prove that Tunisians do read, and that those who read are those who will change the world." (Yesterday, on Sunday, they repeated it again for good measure.)

University student Taqwa Giga sat under a tree and read a Paul Auster novel, unfazed by the traffic of the central avenue. Her friend, Habib El Hafsy, went for a classic: He was reading the Quran. "We're here to remind everyone that books are not neglected," said Taqwa. "People are quite alienated from books, clicking away on their computers. They need to be reminded of the value and richness of books." Habib found it hard to abide by the no-politics theme of the day. "The people who made the revolution didn't just do it out of hunger; they did it out of consciousness," he told me. "We may be a third-world country economically, but intellectually we definitely aren't." Their classmate, Ehsan Timoumi, jumped in: "After years of intellectual sidelining, we wanted to show that change comes from changing mindsets," he said. "It's unfortunate that Arabs in general have little awareness of the importance of reading. But it's culture that will take the country forward." He blamed the censorship of the old regime, which allowed only works that showed it in a positive light, for discrediting reading.

The demonstrators were quite positive about the awareness effect of their campaign. "Plenty of people stopped by to ask us what we were doing," said Taqwa. "Some laughed at us and walked on. And some -- did you see the man who was leaving when you came? We told him what we were doing, and he went and bought a newspaper, and joined us." But there's more to this "protest" than showcasing the importance of culture. Tunisians were once again reclaiming a public space. The first time, they reclaimed it as theirs to declare their political opinions, defying the Ministry of the Interior that stands at the entrance of the avenue, and which had set the dials of freedom of expression at close to zero. This time around they were claiming it as a space that didn't necessarily have to be political.

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Egypt's presidential elections will take place less than four weeks from now and we still don't know who's running. As I've said before in this column (this sentence is fast becoming a fixture of my assessment of Egyptian politics): if it sounds ridiculous, that's because it is.

So far the list of candidates being served up by the Electoral Commission seems as changeable as the menu du jour of a capricious chef. The Commission's website, with no irony whatsoever, is displaying a blank candidate list on its homepage with the date "26 April 2012" in small characters below it, the date the final list is to be announced.

Over the weekend, the electoral commission disqualified 10 of 23 presidential candidates for not fulfilling the conditions to run for election. The commission gave them two days to submit appeals. By law, the decisions of the commission are final.

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On March 14 Burmese state TV allowed something that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago: it broadcast a speech by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her speech, which was leaked online a few days earlier, was partly censored by the authorities, who deleted some unflattering references to the still-powerful military.

But even the broadcast version enabled Suu Kyi, who is running along with other members of her party in the much-anticipated parliamentary by-election on April 1, to deliver a powerful message to a national audience. In her speech, she said that her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), will pursue three priorities should it achieve a presence in parliament: It will work to promote the rule of law, to end the civil war, and to amend the 2008 constitution that grants 25 percent of the seats in parliament to the military without any of its candidates having to stand for election. Aung San Suu Kyi also pledged to support market-oriented economic reform, improvements in education, language rights for ethnic minorities, greater opportunities for young people and women, and freedom of association for labor unions and farmers.

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