The ANC's biggest province, the Eastern Cape, will be the first to elect new provincial leaders since the 2007 Polokwane conference.

Western Cape Premier Helen Zille on Friday named 10 appointees to her provincial Cabinet, including one from the Independent Democrats.

ANC headquarters have been accused of fiddling the party's electoral list for Mpumalanga in order to elbow out party chairperson David DD Mabuza.

The Free State provincial government has taken control of the struggling Xhariep and Mohokare municipalities in the southern parts of the province.

As violent xenophobic clashes that have claimed at least 42 lives spread from Gauteng to Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday gave the go-ahead for the "involvement" of the military. More than 16 000 people have been displaced in Gauteng.

Thousands of terrified survivors of China's earthquake huddled in the open with their meagre belongings on Tuesday as an aftershock struck and the government warned of more powerful ones to come. The panic, which reportedly gripped a vast area, came as China entered its second day of official mourning over the quake.

As a fresh wave of severe xenophobic violence gripped Johannesburg on Sunday, with five people killed in the Cleveland area, hundreds fleeing to the safety of police stations and shops in the CBD looted, President Thabo Mbeki announced that a panel had been set up to look into the attacks.

The Department of Health and the Department of Water Affairs are still collecting door-to-door information on the outbreak of diarrhoea in the Eastern Cape which cost 78 children's lives, the provincial government said on Thursday. Spokesperson Papama Mfenyana said the province was still waiting for information from the team on the ground.

Water contamination was a factor in the death of nearly 80 babies in the Eastern Cape, the provincial government said on Wednesday. An interim report acknowledged that a "multiplicity of causes", including "systematic failures affecting water quality", were to blame for the deaths of the babies, said the provincial government in a statement.

An intensive investigation is under way to establish whether contaminated water in the Eastern Cape caused the death of nearly 80 children, the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry said on Thursday. Earlier this week, media reports said nearly 80 children from the towns of Barkly East, Maclear, Sterkspruit and Elliot had died from diarrhoea and other complications.