Police in Swaziland fired teargas on Monday 30 January at students protesting their university's failure to open for the semester, injuring several people, a student leader said. Police arrested at least four demonstrators after students of the University of Swaziland vowed to occupy the labour ministry and clashed with peers from a teachers college who refused to join their protest. The university announced last week it would not be able to open as scheduled, the second time in two semesters it has postponed its opening.

President of the Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS), Maxwell Dlamini, has been nominated for the 2012 Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk. The award is presented by Front Line, an Irish-based human rights organisation founded by former director of the Irish Section of Amnesty International, Mary Lawlor. Maxwell Dlamini was detained, tortured and forced to sign a confession by members of Swaziland’s police and security forces during the so-called April 12 Swazi Uprising, a peaceful protest inspired by the Arab Spring that was brutally clamped down upon by Swazi police and security forces.

Trade unions are gearing up to advance their fight against the Swaziland regime and the greed of the politicians who voted themselves payoffs and perks worth millions of US dollars. Protestors want the Finance Circular No 1 2010 that authorised the payments scrapped. Swaziland, ruled by King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, is broke and the government is struggling to pay its bills, including wages of public servants. Seven in 10 of the one million population live in abject poverty, earning less than US$2 per day.

King Mswati III of Swaziland is to fly in the face of international opposition and continue his ban on political parties at the national elections next year (2013). Political parties have been banned since 1973 when Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza II, tore up the Swazi constitution and ruled by decree.

Recently hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface of a stream which was the only water source for a rural community in Swaziland's drought-prone eastern region. A local sugar processing plant admitted to accidentally discharging toxic effluent into the stream, and brought in water tanks to supply the community until clean-up operations could be completed. Communities like this one were at the mercy of polluters until the Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) was established five years ago. An environmental watchdog group comprising 16 scientists from various fields, SEA is tasked with enforcing Swaziland's 2002 Environmental Management Act as well as various international environmental treaties to which Swaziland is a signatory.

A new book documents the struggle for democracy in Swaziland in the past year, highlighting the historic 12 April protests in the absolute monarchy in southern Africa.

The first day of trial for the two explosives suspects, Maxwell Thanduk’khanya Dlamini and Musa Ngubeni began 12 January amid much drama. This was after police and political activists were engaged in a showdown after the latter were ordered out of the courtroom for being inappropriately dressed. President of the banned People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) Mario Masuku, and political activist Mphandlana Shongwe then gave over 10 police officers a tongue-lashing at the Magistrates Court.

Coca-Cola has been accused of supporting the regime of Swaziland dictator King Mswati III. The Swaziland Democracy Campaign, an organisation that aims to depose Africa's last absolute monarch, has called on the multi-billion dollar drinks giant to pull out of the country immediately. The US-based beverage firm owns a manufacturing plant in Swaziland - its biggest facility in Africa.

Father of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement Steve Biko would have been 65 on 18 December. Peter Kenworthy looks at the influence of his ideas on Swazi civil society today.

On the heels of a decision by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria to cancel its next round of funding, the Swazi government is calling on donors to come to the impoverished country's aid. However, there are fears that the result of a recent Global Fund audit may dissuade donors even as HIV organisations contest its findings. The country is also contesting a recently released Global Fund audit that alleges nearly US$6 million in aid was misused. With an HIV prevalence of about 26 per cent, Swaziland cannot afford to fund HIV treatment domestically - an estimated 90,000 Swazis are in need of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, according to international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières.

A new wave of HIV activism is rising in Swaziland as people living with HIV take to the streets in protest, many for the first time in their lives, over continued shortages of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Swaziland's deepening financial crisis is taking a toll on service delivery, and the country is experiencing an unprecedented number of protests over issues such as school closures and a lack of HIV treatment. While Africa's last absolute monarchy does not allow formal political opposition to operate, a new brand of HIV activism may be taking hold as anger mounts over a lack of ARVs.

Billionaire businessman Natie Kirsh has endorsed the rule of King Mswati III of Swaziland and criticised efforts to democratise sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy. In reports published in the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer, Kirsh denied that King Mswati 'is an absolute monarch', and ignored the unrest in the country that gave him his start in business in the 1960s. 'I even lacked enough tissue to wipe my wife’s tears as she saw how the country has developed,' he said. Even as Kirsh spoke, Swaziland’s Minister of Finance, Majozi Sithole, reported that the cash-strapped government might not have enough money to pay civil servants this month. Swaziland Solidarity Network member Mumsi Thwala said Kirsh’s remarks at the royal village left her 'stunned, speechless and depressed. Kirsh owes his fortune to a cozy relationship with a dictatorial regime'.

Swaziland spends 4.7 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on paying, equipping and barracking the 3,000 soldiers in its army, and now parliament has passed a US$8 million supplementary budget for the force, provoking a rare public reaction in questioning the role or even the need for an army in view of the deepening economic crisis.

Swaziland's government has failed to pay more than $10m (£6.3m) in grants to Aids orphans because of its financial crisis, an IMF official has said. Swaziland has the world's highest HIV/Aids rate, leaving some 69,000 orphans. The IMF's Joannes Mongardini said the government should cut its wage bill to ease its financial crisis.

A budget crunch in Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, has reached a 'critical stage' with the government struggling to maintain spending on HIV/AIDS, education and the elderly, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday. In a damning assessment of the landlocked southern African nation, the IMF said proposed spending cuts had been undermined by 'overruns' in defence outlays, leading to a 2011/12 budget deficit projection of 10 percent of GDP.

Cash-strapped Swaziland will struggle to pay civil servants' salaries this month, Finance Minister Majozi Sithole told AFP, as the tiny kingdom slips deeper into crisis. 'We will do our best to pay at the end of November but it is difficult. We have serious fiscal challenges right now,' Sithole said. Swaziland fell into crisis after losing 60 per cent of its revenue from a regional customs union last year.

Bongani Masuku believes that Swaziland has reached a point of no return. The momentum towards democracy and a society free of corruption and royal abuse in the name of culture is irreversible.

Swaziland’s economic crisis has forced the government to put on ice the agricultural input scheme that has made the survival of many subsistence farmers and their families less precarious on communal Swazi Nation Land, where 70 per cent of the 1.1 million population live. 'There is no seed subsidizing now. We used to do it, and we are talking about reviving the programme,' Xoxile Nxumalo, of the agriculture ministry, told IRIN. Under the Swazi Agricultural Development Programme, seeds were sold at a discount or provided free of charge to subsistence farmers working on communal land.

Trade unions in Swaziland said on Monday 31 October they had been forced to call off mass demonstrations planned for the week after the government obtained a court order blocking them. Unions had called the strike to draw attention to a three-month paralysis of the country's courts, which lawyers have been boycotting in protest at the dismissal of a top judge accused of insulting King Mswati III.

Swaziland’s parliamentarians are questioning the purpose of a social safety net covering children, the elderly and the disabled. One dismissed it as little more than a public relations exercise, but in the teetering economy the recipients often depend on these small grants and pensions for survival. Donor-dependent Swaziland has been plunged into a financial crisis since receipts from the Southern Africa Customs Union dried up in the wake of the global 2008 slowdown, but finance minister Majozi Sithole recently conceded that government corruption cost the country nearly twice the annual amount budgeted for social services.