Solar water heaters offer people the chance to save money, increase the security of the local and national energy supply, and cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions said to cause climate change. Yet, roofs throughout South Africa are noticeably bare. According to research published this year by Sustainable Energy Africa, less than 1% of households have solar water heaters.

If your sister or friend was killed in 2006, there is an 82% chance that you, or someone else they knew, did it. This is the implication of extraordinary statistics released by the South African Police Service (SAPS) at the Union Buildings recently. They showed that at least two-thirds of all contact crimes occur between people who know one another.

The lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s song, Badlands, resonated in KwaZulu-Natal recently when it was disclosed that 11 amakhosi had made applications to the Nhlapo Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims to be declared kings with a similar status as Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini. The commission was appointed in 2004 by President Thabo Mbeki.

Mail & Guardian cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro – better known as Zapiro – is this year’s winner of the Cartoonist’s Rights Network International’s (CRNI) Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award. The gong is handed out to a cartoonist who chooses to ”express truth to power”, despite being ”threatened by terrorists, government officials or affiliated goon squads”.

”Give me 10 more vehicles and 85 extra cops on the beat and I will take Nyanga off the number one murder spot in the country.” Assistant commissioner Manyano Noqayi of Nyanga police station was speaking this week after the area was, for the second consecutive year, named the neighbourhood with the highest number of murders in the country.

Hillbrow. The word conjures up images of high-rise slums and streets rife with crime. But in this week’s crime statistics, the Hillbrow police station was singled out as one of the country’s better stations. How has it raised its crime detection rate by 12% and notched up a 10% increase in the number of cases it brings to court?

Mbulelo Goniwe will probably be reinstated as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), but he will not return to Parliament if ruling party MPs have anything to do with it. Goniwe lost his job as chief whip in December last year after a disciplinary committee found him guilty of sexual harassment, abuse of power and bringing the party into disrepute.

Women are slowly beginning to make their mark in wage bargaining on the mines, territory that has long been dominated by men. Dr Elize Strydom, the chief negotiator at the Chamber of Mines, is one of the few female negotiators who is making her presence felt inside the bargaining rooms.

At about 4pm on Tuesday afternoon a casual observer might have thought things were back to normal in Refenkgotso, a small township in Deneysville, just south of the Vaal river. The previous morning’s rioting by a mob numbering a few hundred people had left a local ANC councillor dead and a municipal building partially burnt and vandalised. But by the next day, children were playing pick-up soccer games or huddling around braziers as usual.