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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Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free - not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. And many of the world’s top universities are obliging, including Stanford, Princeton and so on.
Koller’s free online university has 640,000 students enrolled from 190 countries. While the students gain qualifications, the professors learn valuable lessons about how learning takes place. Each keystroke, comprehension...
Known for his sharp wit, legendary American author and playwright Gore Vidal, a critical commentator on American politics known to speak truth to power, died on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 aged 86. In his later years, Vidal brought context to our latter-day understanding of where we are in the world today with his deep first hand knowledge of historical fact. In this fascinating interview with the Real News Network he provides extremely valuable insights into how the Cold War started.
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Africa generates massive amounts of money from its natural resources, government revenue and official development assistance. But up to 60% of these funds leave the continent and ends up financing private wealth in offshore financial centers, such as London, New York and Paris - centers that thrive on the tradition of banking secrecy. Léonce Ndikumana, a professor and academic at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, argues that dealing with corrupt African leaders is only half...
Musician and activist, Dave Randall, has written a superb article about the music behind the Arab revolutions highlighting some great music videos from Syria, Egypt and Tunisia. We feature the Syrian clip above and link to the others from this post.
Syria
In the clip above, listen to firefighter and part-time poet, Ibrahim Qashoush, singing in the "traditional call and response folk form of the region", as he criticises the Assad regime at a protest. "A few days...
Speaking at the Biennial International World Aids Conference being hosted in Washington DC this week (attended by 20,000 people), US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton predicted that we could be looking forward to an AIDS free generation -- apparently because the suppression of the virus is proving successful in developed nations. There has also been talk that a cure for AIDS is imminent. But justice of the South African Constitutional Court, Edwin Cameron, who has been living with HIV for 27...
"South Africa is a complete global outlier in terms of its inequality and how inequality has been persistent over time," says Sandeep Mahajan, World Bank lead economist for South Africa. The bank has developed a Human Opportunity Index, which it has started applying for the first time in the country. According to the Word Bank, the factor that matters most in a child's ability to advance in South Africa is his/her "location" with respect to access to opportunities and...
