Recently in Equatorial Guinea Category

Human rights groups and anti-corruption activists are outraged that the corrupt and repressive Equatorial Guinea strongman is part of plans to award the UNESCO-Obiang Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences.

Its a $300,000 scientific grant to be funded and awarded to up to three scientists each year and president Obiang has promised $3 million to the Paris-based U.N. agency to administer the prize during the next five years. The funds ($1.5 million, for awardees the rest to administer the prize) will come from the Obiang Nguema Mbasogo Foundation for the Preservation of Life.

For 30 years  Obiang has distinguished himself with corruption and contempt for human rights and there are concerns that UNESCO will be permanently tainted .

"If there's any way for UNESCO to shoot itself in the foot it's by renting its credibility to President Obiang, whose record of corruption and abuse seems to go against everything the organization supposedly stands for," Kenneth Hurwitz, a lawyer who specializes in anticorruption with the Open Society Justice Initiative, told Colum Lynch's excellent  Foreign Policy blog | Turtle Bay.

By a special correspondent

The playboy son of a notorious African dictator, who was named this week in a US senate money laundering report, has surreptitiously acquired two mansions in Cape Town, South Africa, and a fleet of luxury cars worth more than $10 million.

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, 38, is the aptly named "Playboyof the Southern World" who is lovingly called Tedorini by his dad. American-educated, he managed to accumulate his wealth on a salary of $60 000 a year as a forestry minister in the notoriously corrupt government of Equatorial Guinea.

Teodoro's latest girl friend is the fashion model Eve, according to the New York Daily News. He spent close to $700,000 to rent Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's 303-foot yacht, Tatoosh to impress her recently.

Teodoro spends most of his time as a playboy at his mansions in Cape Town, London, Paris and Los Angeles. A friend of Eve tells the New York tabloid that the Playboy has been after her for a long time and that Eve finally gave in to his invitations - since then its been off and on.