1. There was an emergency situation at the Pelindaba nuclear facility outside Pretoria on Monday morning. “Abnormal levels of gamma radiation associated with xenon and krypton gases [were] detected in and near the building in which radioisotopes are produced for medical applications,” says the SA Nuclear Energy Corporation. Dunno what that means but if I was living in Pretoria West or Hartbeestpoort, I ‘d be thinking of taking a holiday round about now. Read the IOL story here.

2. A two-year-old East London girl died of suspected meningitus at the weekend. Last week a three-year-old girl died of meningitis in Lenasia, bringing to three the number of deaths this year from the illness in Gauteng. Read the News24 story here and go to this BBC web page for tips on how to detect meningitus, which starts out feeling like a bad dose of flu.

3. President Kgalema Motlanthe has finally signed off on amendments to the controversial Broadcasting Bill that gives Parliament the power to fire the SABC board. Read The Times story here.

4. Things are getting a litte weird in Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal where girls at a particular school are having fainting fits. Read The Witness story here. There was a case of kids fainting in a school in North West province a little while back after they saw ghostly dwarfs flitting about the classroom. Maybe the little beasties have moved down to KZN.

5. If you can wing the maths at school, engineering is the things to do. A Human Sciences Research Council reports says that not only is SA losing engineers to foreign countries but many are ending up in the financial and business services sectors. But how’s this for a scary statistic from the report: SA has only 473 engineers per million people compared with Japan, which has 3306. Read the Business Day story here.

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