The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
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At least 20 million people have lost their homes as a result of the floods in Pakistan and more than 1,600 have died. The United Nations (UN) has asked the international community for US$460 million in emergency aid.
Pledges of international aid have been coming in slowly. As of Friday last week, the UN only received US$230 million. These funds fall far short of what is needed for the country to rebuild homes and livelihoods.
To put the figure into perspective, in 2009, BP made more in...
WikiLeaks is the whistle blowing website that released more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan last month, some of which point to war crimes by coalition forces.
On Friday, 21 August 2010, Swedish authorities charged WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, with two charges of rape and issued an arrest warrant for him. Six hours later, the charges were dropped. Al Jazeera speaks to Assange about these charges and why they were dropped.
According to Assange,...
In a 2009 interview, Indian activist, Vandana Shiva, argued, "Over the last decade, 200,000 farmers have committed suicide (in India)…In Vidharbha, 4,000 are committing suicide annually. This is the region where four million acres of cotton have been grown with Monsanto's Bt cotton. The suicides are a direct result of a debt trap created by ever-increasing costs of seeds and chemicals and constantly falling prices of agricultural produce."
Over the years, the plight of...
Minqi Li, Professor of Political Economy, from the University of Utah in the US, talks to Paul Jay of the Real News Network about the recent wave of workers' strikes in China. Li is author of the book, "The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy."
In June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it's time for workers’ wages to go up.
There's been much talk about China restructuring its economy to boost domestic demand. There has been much...
A report that highlights the desperation of poor Americans. According to this MSNBC report, last week 30,000 people turned up close to the city of Atlanta just to get an application form for public housing. People queued for hours in extremely hot weather, some passing out from heat exhaustion, simply for the opportunity to get onto the public housing waiting list.
Notwithstanding the humiliation of having to wait for hours to collect application forms from a clearly disorganized housing...
In this recent interview with Russia Today, progressive journalist, John Pilger, argues, "What WikiLeaks has done, is what journalists should have done."
In his view, the WikiLeaks exposés might change journalism all together and if not change it, then at least wake it up.
WikiLeaks has given us a sense of the "political disaster that is behind the human disaster in Afghanistan."
It also highlights the need for "journalists to separate themselves from the...
