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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Minister of Mineral Resources, Susan Shabangu, has suspended Australian mining company Mintails' operations in Kagiso 1 on the West Rand after community members embarked on protests citing serious environmental, safety and health violations and structural damage to their houses as a result of the mine’s operations in close proximity to their homes. Media for Justice reports that community members view government’s investigation into Mintails operations as a smokescreen to...
Dutch filmmaker Marije Meerman has produced a trilogy of films examining the secretive and exploitative world of high frequency trading. “Super-quick computers and advanced mathematical formulas have largely taken over trading on the financial markets from human beings”. Experts explain that algorithms are now the drivers of a system so complex that humans fail to comprehend it. “Algorithms secretly lie in waiting for the moment that your pension money gets on the...
Cosmetics and personal care products are among the least regulated consumer products on the market today. Right now companies are allowed to use virtually any product that they want without any safety assessments before putting products on the market. Cosmetic products include makeup, shampoos, face washes, cologne, aftershave and even baby products. Of the 12,000 chemicals used in the cosmetics industry today, some 80 percent have never been assessed for safety. We simply do not know what...
In an interview with Democracy Now! following the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who died on Saturday, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author and Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky says, "There is a convention that you’re not supposed to speak ill of the recently dead, which unfortunately imposes a kind of vow of silence, because there is nothing good to say. (Sharon) was a brutal killer; he had...
It is predicted that trillions of dollars of wealth will be transferred to the hands of a new generation of philanthropists in the next half-century. “It’s the biggest inter-generational transfer of wealth that we've ever seen. (And) so much of what happens in the future will depend on what the rising generation of major donors (now in their twenties and thirties) will become. Will they do things very differently from the previous generation?", asks Caroline Hartnell of...
Have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?
Benjamin Bratton writes about entanglements of technology and culture - how technologies enable the making of certain worlds and at the same time, how culture structures how those technologies will evolve. The conceptualization of possibilities is...
