The four men were convicted of Zoliswa Nkonyana's killing in October last year
Four South African men have been sentenced to 18 years in jail for stabbing and stoning to death 19-year-old lesbian Zoliswa Nkonyana in 2006.
The court found that the men killed Ms Nkonyana because she was living openly as a lesbian.
A crowd outside the court in Khayelitsha, a Cape Town township, cheered and danced at the sentencing.
The constitution protects people on the grounds of sexual orientation - but homophobia is widespread.
Lubabalo Ntlabathi, Sicelo Mase, Luyanda Londzi and Mbulelo Damba - who were convicted in October - were each given 18 years.
Their jail terms were each suspended for five years.
Five other people were acquitted.
Ms Nkonyana was stoned and stabbed nine times in February 2006, just metres from her home in Khayelitsha.
The magistrate said it was clear the motive for the killing was hatred and homophobia - and Wednesday's sentence was meant to send out a signal that violence based on sexual orientation will not be tolerated, the South African Press Association reports.
In December, the global rights group Human Rights Watch said in a report that South Africa is "desperately failing lesbian and transgender people" - despite the country's liberal laws.
The BBC's Pumza Fihlani in Johannesburg says violence against gay and lesbian people is common.
Lesbians are often subjected to "corrective rape" by men who think this will "cure" them of their homosexuality.
Three years ago, a man was sentenced to life in prison and another to 32 years for the gang rape, robbery and murder of Eudy Simelane, a lesbian activist who had been a midfielder on the national football team.
BOSTON (AP) — A small fishing boat lost off Massachusetts after its crew was thrown out in rough seas has been discovered near Spain more than three years later.
Scott Douglas and Rich St. Pierre were tossed off the 26-foot-long boat in August 2008 and forced to swim two hours to shore. The U.S. Coast Guard says the boat was left adrift because the seas were so dangerous.
But the Coast Guard said Wednesday that the boat was found 20 miles off Spain on Jan. 17. It was intact but covered in rust and barnacles.
The Coast Guard says the boat likely got into the Gulf Stream, then headed east with the North Atlantic Current for the 4,000-mile trip. The agency says such trans-Atlantic trips are rare, but not unheard of.
Study of mysterious skin illness uncovers its cause: It's all in the patients' heads: http://t.co/64fa2ACy
A Swedish woman who lost her wedding ring 16 years ago was flabbergasted when she found it again, around a carrot growing in her garden, media reported Saturday.
Lena Paahlsson had taken off the white gold ring before a Christmas baking session with her daughters in 1995, but it had disappeared from the kitchen counter where she placed it.
After looking everywhere, and even pulling up floorboards in the search, Paahlsson and her family, who live on a farm in northern Sweden, had given up on seeing the ring again, she told the Dagens Nyheter daily.
That was until October this year, when she was picking the last carrots in her garden and suddenly found one with her ring glimmering around it.
The family thinks the ring must have fallen into the sink back in 1995 and been mixed with potato peels that were composted or fed to the sheep, since all the soil in the garden comes from composted vegetables and sheep dung.
The ring no longer fits Paahlsson, but she told Dagens Nyheter she plans to have it enlarged.
"I had given up hope. Now that I have found the ring again ... I want to be able to use it," she said.
Daniel Sandford in Moscow: 'It is in many ways a political reawakening"'
Thousands of people have attended the biggest anti-government rally in the Russian capital Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union.
As many as 50,000 people gathered on an island near the Kremlin to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections and demand a re-run.
Other, smaller rallies took place in St Petersburg and other cities.
Communists, nationalists and Western-leaning liberals turned out together despite divisions between them.
The protesters allege there was widespread fraud in Sunday's polls though the ruling United Russia party did see its share of the vote fall sharply.
Demonstrations in the immediate aftermath of the election saw more than 1,000 arrests, mostly in Moscow, and several key protest leaders such as the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny were jailed.
A message from Mr Navalny was released through his blog, saying: "The time has come to throw off the chains. We are not cattle or slaves. We have a voice and we have the strength to defend it."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has never experienced popular protests like these before, the BBC's Steve Rosenberg reports from Moscow.
During his decade in power, first as president then prime minister, he has grown used to being seen as Russia's most popular and powerful politician.
But as one of the protesters put it to our correspondent, Russia is changing.
'We are the people'
Police put the number gathering on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square for the "Fair Elections" rally at 25,000 while organisers talked of 100,000.
The BBC's Daniel Sandford reports from the scene that the number seems to be closer to 50,000, and people continued to rally on the square after hearing the speakers.
A resolution was passed calling for the cancellation of Sunday's election results, new elections, the resignation of electoral commission chief Vladimir Churov, an investigation into the alleged ballot-rigging and the immediate release of arrested protesters.
Konstantin Kosachyov, a United Russia MP authorised to speak on behalf of the Kremlin, ruled out holding negotiations on the organisers' demands.
"With all respect for the people who came out to protest, they are not a political party," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
Authorities had permitted the protest on condition the rally was relocated from central Revolution Square to Bolotnaya Square, an island in the Moscow River just south of the Kremlin where access points could be easily controlled.
Marchers to the rally streamed across a bridge under the walls of the Kremlin walls, past a long line of police.
Prominent figures at the rally included younger opposition activists like Yevgenia Chirikova, as well as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister under the late Boris Yeltsin.
At least 50,000 police and riot troops were deployed in Moscow ahead of Saturday's protests and the city began to resemble a police state rather than a democracy, Daniel Sandford says.
There were no immediate reports of protest-related arrests in Moscow but the interior ministry reported 130 arrests at rallies across the country, most of them in Khabarovsk in the far east.
In other developments
Protesters in the Pacific port of Vladivostok waved banners with slogans like "The rats should go!" and "Swindlers and thieves - give us our elections back!"
In Kurgan, on the border with Kazakhstan, police dispersed an unapproved rally after between 200 and 400 protesters gathered on a square in freezing weather
Some 3,000 people braved temperatures of minus 20C for a two-hour rally in Novosibirsk
At least 3,000 people rallied in Yekaterinburg to chant "Freedom to political prisoners" and "Russia without Putin", with one protester waving a large teddy bear - the symbol of the United Russia party is a bear - impaled on a stick
Danil Klubov, a student from St Petersburg, says he is "tired of all the falsehoods and lies"
In St Petersburg, Russia's second city, thousands packed into Pionerskaya Square to hear speeches calling for the election to be re-run and for Mr Putin to resign, the BBC's Richard Galpin reports.
The protest was peaceful and well organised though some protesters were dragged away by police elsewhere in the city.
Daniil Klubov, a student leader at the rally in St Petersburg, told the BBC students had been under pressure not to attend the protests.
"I do not belong to any political movement - I am just a student who is tired of all these lies," he said.
He and others, he said, had received anonymous threats on vKontakte, a Russian networking website similar to Facebook, that they faced prison terms, expulsion from university or military conscription.
"Some people are really scared but a lot of people understand that the more people who turn out, the better our chances," he added.
Police put the turnout in St Petersburg at 10,000.
Advice to Medvedev
According to the official results of the elections to Russia's Duma, United Russia saw its share of the vote fall from 64% to 49%, though it remains easily the biggest party.
But there is a widespread view, fuelled by mobile phone videos and accounts on internet social networking sites, that there was wholesale election fraud and that Mr Putin's party cheated its way to victory.
On Friday, the presidential Council for Human Rights advising Mr Medvedev said the reports of vote-rigging were of deep concern, and that the elections should be rerun if they were confirmed.
However the council has no power to order a fresh ballot, correspondents say.
Mr Putin, who was president between 2000 and 2008, remains widely predicted to win a presidential election in March.
On Thursday, he blamed the US for stoking the recent unrest, after Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressed reservations over the poll.
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The four men were convicted of Zoliswa Nkonyana's killing in October last year
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