She’d lived on this historically black D.C. block for 40 years. Now the city she knew was vanishing, and so was her place in it.

She was moving slowly, but she needed to speed up. Her blue sandals clicked on the hardwood floor, echoing off the empty green walls of the two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in Northwest Washington where she had spent the past 40 years of her life. Reluctantly, she spun from one room to the next, packing boxes, folding sheets, unfolding sheets, opening cupboards, closing cupboards, doing a mental inventory.

Community rights activist Eakachai Itsaratha recalls his brush with death after being abducted in southern Thailand.

Bangkok, Thailand - As an outspoken community rights activist in a country with one of the worst records of enforced disappearances in the region, Eakachai Itsaratha long understood that one day he too would become a target.

South Africa’s land panel finally produced its report at the end of July. At 144 pages it’s an impressive document, making all the right noises. South Africa, like Zimbabwe, left the land issue for too long. 25 years after freedom, at least now a serious move is being made in South Africa. But will it make a difference?

 Former Zimbabwean deputy Prime Minister Professor Arthur Mutambara has warned South Africa against implementing a chaotic approach in the expropriation of land calling on them to learn from their northern neighbours. 

Said Mutambara at a presentation at Rhodes University:

“There is a problem that you must watch out for as South Africans, land expropriation is a good idea but might be abused by the elite who take a good idea and use it as a political tool.”

A total of 42 people - including government officials - have been accused of orchestrating a corrupt land reform project worth hundreds of millions of rand.

A damning report for the Special Investigative Unit (SIU) has uncovered a huge network of fraud relating to land reform projects in South Africa, casting a shadow over the future of the ANC’s land redistribution plans.

The revised draft bill, which gives the minister of public works the power to accept or reject compensation offers made by the owners of land that has been identified for expropriation, was published in the Government Gazette on 21 December 2018 after it’s publication for further comment was approved by Cabinet on 5 December 2018.

“Interested persons may submit written submissions on the draft expropriation bill 2019 not later than 60 days from the date of publication of this notice,” Minister Thulas Nxesi said.

The expropriation of land without compensation is dominating debate on land reform, but speakers at a conference on land reform on Wednesday said there are deeper and more imperative challenges to tackle to ensure South Africans access to land. 

Changing the law to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation will have little impact on land reform unless the government first tackles systemic problems within its own institutions that have hampered land reform in the democratic era.

A 300-year-old community in Bangkok will have its homes demolished as part of the city's modernisation plans

BANGKOK  - For more than two decades, a community of more than 300 people living next to an old fort in Bangkok staved off drug dealers keen to extend their turf, and city officials eager to tear down their homes and build a park to draw more tourists.

As President Donald Trump ponders his response to yet another chemical weapons attack in Syria, advisers and commentators alike are mired in short-term calculations. But one day the Syrian conflict will come to an end. Whether this will involve the kind of negotiated settlement being sought in Geneva, or a much less formal accommodation of a bleak status quo, the resolution of housing, land and property (HLP) rights will be an essential part of any future peace.

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa took a step on Tuesday to hasten the transfer of land from white to black owners when parliament backed a motion seeking to change the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation.

The ruling African National Congress has long promised reforms to redress racial disparities in land ownership and the subject remains highly emotive more than two decades after the end of apartheid. Whites still own most of South Africa’s land following centuries of brutal colonial dispossession.