For the nearly 50 million people of South Africa, the 2010 World Cup represents an opportunity to show the world its progress through sports. But for a new nonprofit organisation, soccer's biggest stage also offers an opportunity to publicise young women who tend to go unheard.

Informal traders’ hopes of making huge profits during the upcoming World Cup tourist influx were shattered last week when they were ordered to vacate Park Station, a key transit hub in Johannesburg’s central business district. Ironically, the incident occurred during South Africa’s Human Rights Day celebrations; the day South Africa remembers 69 victims from Sharpeville who died during the protest of pass laws.

For a number of years now, particularly in the period of globalisation, trade unions have been faced with major challenges which call for strategic responses. These challenges include building trade union internationalism in the period of mobile capital, assessing relations with left political parties as these have been dragged towards the political centre, tensions between collective bargaining and defensive struggles and strategic, revolutionary unionism and so on. This, the first of a new series of Annual Conferences, hosted by ILRIG and other partners, is an opportunities for activists and analysts - trade unionists as well as those involved in social movement campaigns - in South Africa to debate experiences of organising in South Africa, and elsewhere, whilst hearing of other forms of trade unionism in South Africa and elsewhere.

Commemorating Freedom Day on 27 April, the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project (LGEP) will be hosting a “Freedom for all Rally” at the Eudy Simelane Memorial Park (Kwa – Thema), celebrating constitutional freedoms by remembering all victims of hate crimes and demanding full liberation in South Africa.

With a request for a $3.75 billion World Bank loan for a new coalfired power plant, South African political leaders seem determined to entrench a policy on climate change that disregards clear evidence of catastrophic consequences, echoing the earlier disastrous policies of former President Thabo Mbeki on AIDS. But opposition is mounting to the current plan, which would consolidate South Africa's Eskom as the continent's leading producer of greenhouse gases.

South Africa's antiretroviral treatment guidelines have been updated. The guidelines offer a range of improvements over the 2004 guidelines including new, more tolerable antiretrovirals, immediate ARV treatment for drug-resistant TB patients and improved prevention of mother to child transmission procedures.

Rape victims will no longer need a case number before getting treatment at health institutions said Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. Motsoaledi said when a rape victim arrives at a health institution, they won't be asked to produce a case number before being treated.

South African President Jacob Zuma urged Western nations to lift targeted sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his allies, saying they were undermining the nation’s coalition government. “We don’t need these sanctions now,” Zuma told lawmakers in Parliament in Cape Town.

South Africa’s government has drafted a new land policy that proposes limits to land ownership by its own citizens and foreigners, its Rural Development and Land Reform Minister has said.

In an indication that the global climate justice movement is becoming broader, there is now intense opposition to a climate-destroying energy loan for South Africa. The campaign’s leaders are community activists in black townships allied with environmentalists, trade unionists and international climate activists.

Several anti-trafficking campaigns have been initiated in South Africa ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup. These campaigns intend to prevent individuals from being trafficked by raising awareness about this exploitative practice and providing information about the danger it presents. Anti-trafficking initiatives are important, but it is equally important that the information presented in these campaigns is accurate and based on evidence, rather than merely aiming to instill fear and outrage.

The Johannesburg High Court on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of a family of eight asylum seekers who fled the Taliban in Afghanistan, after more than four months in detention and numerous attempts by Home Affairs to illegally return them to Afghanistan. The two parents, their five minor children, and the oldest daughter’s fiancé, also a minor, were arrested separately at the OR Tambo Airport following attempts to join family members in France who were also refugees.

Ethembeni Enrichment Centre, a school in a run-down part of Port Elizabeth, the largest city in Eastern Cape, South Africa's poorest province, has achieved a remarkable 100 percent pass rate for a dozen years. But officials from the education department, sent on a fact-finding mission to learn from the school's success, are running more than two hours late.

Constitutional rights of South Africa¡¯s gay people are facing an increasing threat from radical elements in the conservative sector, Christina Engela of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) said also stating that gays and lesbians still have a long way to go before they can be equal to heterosexuals in terms of human rights.

There is a high prevalence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis amongst patients with HIV in South Africa, investigators report in the April 1st edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

From April 15, everyone attending a clinic or hospital will be offered an HIV test, regardless of whether they have symptoms of the disease or not. Dubbed the HIV Counselling and Testing campaign, or HCT, this is the most ambitious HIV testing campain in the world, according to SA National AIDS Council (SANAC) co-chairperson Mark Heywood.

The Inner Circle (TIC) will host the Annual International Retreat (AIR) aimed at challenging Muslim extremism as well as engaging the impact of this on gender and sexual minorities.

South African President Jacob Zuma has survived a vote of no-confidence called by opposition parties. The vote - the first such move since the ANC came to power in 1994 - was defeated by 241 votes to 84 with eight abstentions.

It has been called the “new Great Trek” by South Africans who remember their history. Presently, over 30-million hectares in almost 30 African countries have been auctioned to a host of corporations and governments, from China — housing one fifth of the world’s population on 8% of the world’s arable land — to oil-rich, water-poor Gulf nations.

South Africa is to fast-track a comprehensive new law against human trafficking before the start of the soccer World Cup, Justice Minister Jeff Radebe has said. South Africa hosts the month-long event from June 11 and some child rights groups have warned that trafficking, mainly for sexual exploitation, could rise during the tournament.