Reuters reports that a rising number of unaccompanied Zimbabwean children are entering South Africa, according to a nongovernmental organisation that provides assistance to refugees and displaced people.

According to a Reuters report, South Africa's interior ministry will introduce biometric testing, closed circuit television and a document-tracking system in its own buildings to crack down on corruption many say is rampant.

Alarming figures released by a South African provincial education department indicate that schoolgirl pregnancies have doubled in the past year, despite a decade of spending on sex education and AIDS awareness.

On February 12, a young South African man was accidentally shot outside the Bafana Bafana spaza shop in Motherwell township in Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Municipality. Police claim he was shot by Somali shopkeeper Hassan Alow. Alow said thieves who had robbed his shop shot the boy.

Two men raped a 19-year-old woman because they wanted to know how it felt to sleep with a lesbian. The crime, which has been condemned by woman's rights activists, took place at White House squatter camp in Vosman near Witbank on Saturday.

The Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian film festival opened on Thursday 1st March with the film “Beautiful Boxer” an excellent film about a trans woman from Thailand. What was also exceptional was the speech delivered by Deputy Chief Justice Moseneke who opened the festival.

Using a vivid mosaic of public controversies and ethnographic vignettes, Fassin works through the controversial denials of South African president Thabo Mbeki and the precautionary policies of his health ministers within histories of apartheid, epidemics which justified segregation, and secret biological warfare plans of Project Coast, as well as wider battles over the ethical protocols of Aids testing and widening inequalities."-Michael M.J.Fischer, author of _Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.

In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global Aids crisis-the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the Aids epidemic in South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period. One person in ten is infected with HIV in South Africa, and President Thabo Mbeki has initiated a global controversy by funding questionable medical research, casting doubt on the benefits of preventing mother-to-child transmission, and embracing dissidents who challenge the viral theory of Aids. Fassin contextualises Mbeki's position by sensitively exploring issues of race and genocide that surround this controversy. Basing his discussion on vivid ethnographical data collected in the townships of Johannesburg, he passionately demonstrates that the unprecedented epidemiological crisis in South Africa is a demographic catastrophe as well as a human tragedy, one that cannot be understood without reference to the social history of the country, in particular to institutionalised racial inequality as the fundamental principle of government during the past century.

Thirteen years ago a secondary school in Soweto, South Africa's most populous black urban residential area, was little different from the majority of the country's schools: dilapidated, under staffed and crime ridden, with the vast majority of its students struggling to pass their exams.

Widely reported as "the first farm expropriation", the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights recently announced that it had expropriated a 25 200ha farm near Barkley West in the Northern Cape to settle a restitution claim by 471 families.

South Africa is joining countries such as Brazil, India and Uganda in implementing open-source software in all government departments -- and getting rid of widely used Microsoft Windows desktop programmes that come with expensive licences.

Human Rights Watch has released a report - “Keep Your Head Down” Unprotected Migrants in South Africa - in which it details how South African officials involved in the arrest and deportation of undocumented migrant workers often assault and extort money from them, and commercial farmers employing them routinely violate their basic labor rights.

South Africa's environment minister on Wednesday proposed contraception and some culling -- but no mass slaughter -- as part of a package of measures to slow rampant elephant population growth.

The Out In Africa (OIA) gay and lesbian film festival, South Africa's most popular film festival, is well into its teens. And appropriately, now in its thirteenth year, there are some big changes afoot.

The Civil Union Act, which legalised same-sex marriages, 'marked the end of the Zulu nation and its way of life'. This was the feeling at the opening of a two-day conference of the heads of Zulu warriors and maidens, organised by Local Government and Traditional Affairs MEC Mike Mabuyakhulu, in Durban this month.

A British businessman and his South African partner have brought sexual discrimination claims against a major airline to the Human Rights Commission (HRC) after they were ordered by an air hostess to "cover up" while on a domestic flight earlier this month.

Gauteng Province Premier Mbazima Shilowa has said education and skills development were essential if people were to escape the poverty trap and improve their standard of living, but there were inequalities in the schooling system that were detrimental to black pupils.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/broadcasts/phumla.jpgPhumla Masuku, the manager of a South African lesbian women's football team speaks to Sokari Ekine from Pambazuka News about the team she founded, . Based in Soweto, the team hs encountered much homophobia and racism, but successfully made it to the international Gay Games in Chicago where they won the Bronze Medal. The music in this podcast is by Freddy Macha.

A high-speed condom, designed in South Africa, is poised to take safer sex to new heights in a nation grappling with soaring HIV infection rates. Roelf Mulder, co-designer the product, said he hoped its aesthetic appeal would help change the latex prophylactic usually thought of as a passion killer into a passion filler, while also preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Global Integrity (GI) director, Marianne Camerer, has said that despite South Africa making notable gains in its fight to stem graft, opportunities still existed for high-level corruption in the country.

The head of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Olive Shisana, has called on government to prioritize treatment for HIV-positive teachers and nurses, saying the country cannot afford to let these key service providers die.