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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Human beings have been campaigning against inequality and poverty for 3,000 years - but this journey is accelerating contends celebrity activist, Bono. In this TED talk, Bono dazzles with selective data sets, which based on trends in a few African countries, show that the end of poverty may be in sight. According to Bono, if the world continues on its current trajectory, the number of people living on less than a US$1,25 a day is set to be eliminated by 2028.
© TED
Due to the growth of social networking on the Internet, we no longer have to react to emotions in real time," says Cliff Nass, professor of communications at Stanford University. Faces and voices are the most descriptive forms of emotion, and new research suggests that heavy users of social media are less able to assess emotion successfully, leading to "emotional atrophy", the difficulty to understand and process emotions in real time.
Social media has now become the...
Section 27 of the South African Constitution guarantees the right to food. However, if one tracks the impact of inflation on the poor, one finds that their purchasing power is being eroded because the basket of goods on which the CPI is based is determined by the middle class and the elites, argues Isobel Frye, director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII).
Worse, poor South Africans face even greater prejudices. Her organisation's research has found that the goods...
Caught between the promise of prosperity that natural gas extraction in the Karoo might bring and concerns about environmental and health impacts, citizens’ resistance to fracking is growing.
But that’s not all. Fracking also poses a threat to The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, which sits right inside one of the drilling areas for natural gas. There is a real fear that opening up the area to natural gas exploration will...
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez succumbed to cancer on 5 March 2013 at 16h25. Chavez left an indelible mark on Venezuela and on global politics not only for his robust focus on alleviating poverty, but also for his strong stance against American imperialism. He was particularly critical of the human cost of the global war on terror.
Chavez was revered by Venezuela's poor, but reviled by its middle and upper classes, including the country's private media that actively participated in a...
American Attorney for Julian Assange, Michael Ratner, reports he was in the courtroom and witnessed Bradley Manning speak with confidence and intelligence as he detailed the outrages that drove him to upload documents to WikiLeaks. While Manning has not pleaded guilty to charges of espionage and aiding the enemy, he has pleaded guilty to lesser charges related to distribution. One of the many atrocities he helped expose was the killing of unarmed Reuters staff members in Iraq by a US military...
