The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, scheduled to meet in Swakopmund, Namibia, from November 2 to 5, 2009, should immediately suspend Zimbabwe for continuing human rights abuses and widespread smuggling in the Marange diamond fields.

Equatorial Guinea is perhaps the world's most striking example of why oil hurts, rather than helps, many of the countries that have it. Will the Obama administration stop the country's dictator from sucking its people dry?

Zimbabwe has failed to remove its armed forces from the diamond fields in Marange and to end related human rights abuses there. As a result, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) should suspend Zimbabwe immediately.

The government of Equatorial Guinea has set new low standards of political and economic malfeasance in handling its billions of dollars in oil revenue instead of improving the lives of its citizens.

They might end up as costly baubles on sale in shops around the world. But for some diamonds mined in Zimbabwe, the journey begins in massive illegal pit mines where men, women, and children are forced to work long days under the brutal authority of government troops, who took over the mine in a spree of bloodshed.

Zimbabwe's armed forces are engaging in the forced labor of children and adults, and are torturing and beating local villagers on the diamond fields of Marange district in eastern Zimbabwe.

Namibia hosts the Kimberley Process Intersessional Meeting in Windhoek starting tomorrow. Namibia's Deputy Mines Minister, Bernhard Esau, who chairs the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), has a problem on his hands:  protecting the integrity and credibility of the Process and the international diamond industry.

The computer industry should make it clear to the Chinese government that it will not cooperate in efforts to curtail access to information on the internet through government-mandated or provided filtering software such as the "Green Dam Youth Escort" program.