As the 2010 World Cup kicks off this Friday, thousands of football fans will arrive in South Africa to cheer on their favourite teams. HIV awareness and prevention is also a high priority during this time. HIV can spread particularly among young people, through the dangerous combination of alcohol and unsafe sex.

The first black South African to become bishop of the Anglican diocese of Natal, and chairman of the KwaZulu-Natal Christian Council (KZNCC), Rubin Phillip is playing a crucial role in opposing the government’s attempted subjugation of Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), a South African shack-dweller movement, writes Emma Pomfret. Pomfret investigates the recent traumas endured by AbM, and talks to the bishop about his commitment to seeing those who are suffering take charge of their own destiny.

Following South African President Zuma’s first official visit to India last week, Sanusha Naidu investigates what kind of ‘strategic partnership’ was being forged between the two countries and who the partners were. Despite Gandhi’s vision for the commerce between India and Africa to be of ‘ideas and services’, this strategic partnership, says Naidu, is ‘really about the business of business is business’.

The excitement over the FIFA World Cup is not just about football, it's also about the party. Large quantities of alcohol are sure to be consumed as foreign football fans rub shoulders with locals, and inhibitions are likely to fall away. The World Cup has long been associated with boom times for the sex trade, but in a country where one in five adults is living with HIV, the price of throwing caution to the wind and having unprotected sex with a local, let alone a sex worker, could be extremely high.

"Polakow-Suransky puts Israel's annual military exports to South Africa between 1974 and 1993 at $600 million, which made South Africa Israel's second or third largest trading partner after the United States and Britain. ... He puts the total military trade between the countries at well above $10 billion over the two decades." - Glenn Frankel in review of new book "The Unspoken Alliance". Polakow-Suransky's book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0375425462), is hardly the first to outline the open secret of Israel's military relationship with apartheid South Africa (see books listed below). But it is certainly the most well-documented and will arguably be the most influential.

HIV-positive individuals who are obese or overweight are less likely to die or develop tuberculosis than people with HIV who are of normal weight, South African investigators report in the online edition of AIDS. “Our findings show a clear protective effect…of increasing BMI [body mass index] on both all-cause mortality and incident TB [tuberculosis] in a South African cohort”, comment the investigators, “person with obese and overweight BMI have a significantly decreased risk of both mortality and TB.”

An amendment to the Health Act allowing counselors to draw blood for HIV testing will see more people being tested. Head of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, Dr Francois Venter said unclear policy on whether counselors could test for HIV meant there were less people allowed to conduct the testing and less people being tested.

On the heels of winning a $3.75 million loan from the World Bank, South African utility Eskom is now seeking carbon credits from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism. Environmentalists are outraged that one of the largest coal plants in the world could receive public funds from both the World Bank and the CDM.

For six families living in derelict changing rooms next to one of South Africa's official training venues in Cape Town, the prospect of the football World Cup has turned from a dream to a nightmare. The families who comprise 24 people, half of them children, are facing eviction to make space for the parking area next to the Athlone Stadium which has been upgraded to the tune of 406m rand ($53m, £36m) to bring it up to Fifa standards.

African nations are increasingly turning to South Africa to improve their own agricultural production and skills, according to industry group Agri SA. About 20 countries from across Africa have approached Agri SA, South Africa’s largest farmers’ association, seeking to recruit commercial growers or learn skills from their neighbor on the continent’s southern tip.

South Africans appear to have had their constitutional right to protest suspended during the 2010 World Cup, writes Jane Duncan, following a directive from the country’s police service (SAPS) to municipalities hosting matches. Sceptical of claims that the country does not have the capacity to police marches and the World Cup simultaneously, Duncan asks whether SAPS decision is motivated by ‘the need to remake South Africa's brand in the international media as a land of peace, reconciliation and stability’, or if it reflects, more seriously, ‘an intensification of a recent trend towards suppressing the waves of protest action’ by the Zuma administration.

South Africa is hosting the continent's first soccer World Cup but the mounting anticipation is not drowning out a vicious whispering campaign calling for the expulsion of foreign nationals within hours of the curtain going down on football's biggest jamboree. The local media has been awash with anecdotal stories of conspiracies brewing at taxi ranks, shebeens and markets to bring a pogrom against foreign African nationals, who are blamed for taking jobs and diverting government services, while NGOs concerned with the plight of refugees and migrants are becoming more worried as 12 July - the day after the final game - draws near.

South African farmers have not received government support for 10 years, but Agriculture Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson intends to change this by pushing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) restrictions to the limit to do so. State assistance to agriculture has been a controversial issue for many years in the WTO and is on the agenda in the current Doha round of negotiations. Of particular importance are support measures for agriculture in developed countries that render products from the developing world uncompetitive.

Surveys of condom use in women based on self-report may be seriously unreliable, to the extent of overestimating true use by 100%, the 2010 International Microbicides Conference has heard. This finding comes from a South African survey, but if it applies broadly it may have significant effects on trial design and mathematical modelling of the effect of microbicides.

Donors are disengaging from the fight against HIV/AIDS leaving behind millions who are still in dire need of lifesaving treatment in South Africa and other hard-hit Sub-Saharan African countries, warned Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

South Africa has invited Sudan's Omar al-Bashir to the continent's first World Cup along with the rest of Africa's leadership, but will arrest him if he takes up the invitation, President Jacob Zuma said. Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes. He rejects the charges of ordering mass murder, rape and torture in the western Darfur region.

The Anglican church in Southern Africa called on President Jacob Zuma and the South African government to lobby for the immediate release of two Malawian men sentenced to 14 years in prison for their homosexual relationship. “We urge them to press for the swift release of these two individuals, who have committed no act of violence or harm against anyone; for the quashing of the sentence against them; and for the repeal of this repressive legislation,” the Synod of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa said.

A local group representing informal settlements has warned plans to erect shacks outside Cape Town Stadium unless proper housing is given to the poor. Abahlali Basemjondolo demanded the underprivileged be allocated housing within the city but authorities were having none of it. Basemjondolo planned to use the World Cup as a platform to vent their frustration with city bosses.

Mostly South Africans celebrate freedom day. Some they feel free but some do not feel free. Some are told that they are free and get excited because they trust those who tell them that they are free. They still have hope that one day the politicians will recognise them. As hard as it is we all have to face up to the reality that this is a false hope. We have to face up to the need for a second struggle.

On 25 May, the continent, along with Africans all over the world, celebrate Africa Day. In most corners, it is an opportunity to celebrate the diversity and richness of African culture. In South Africa, Africa Day is taking on special significance as the nation prepares to “welcome the world” for the FIFA World Cup.
Yet, reports in the United Kingdom’s The Guardian and another in the South African Mail and Guardian about the possibility of post-event xenophobia in the country should remind us that just two years ago the nation came together with a rallying commitment to say “never again.”