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?
Sarah Lazare -
The Turkish government launched violent raids, mass arrests, and torrents of tear gas and water cannon fire across the country Tuesday in an effort to quell the widespread uprisings against the ruling AKP party, now well into their third week.
Police are shooting water cannons filled with damaging chemicals, say Turkish protesters on a Wikileaks Forum showing photographs of demonstrators with burns across their legs and backs.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Tuesday that...
"Lots of people live under bridges," a Johannesburg judge said after a group of people was evicted from a building. Three days after their eviction, a young woman gave birth to a baby. She was found living under a bridge with her newborn. When lawyers appealed to a judge to allow the group back into the building on the grounds that women, children and a newborn were living under a bridge, the judge chose to protect the rights of the property owner over the rights of the vulnerable...
Moderate cleric and former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rouhani has won the recent Iranian presidential election. Iran's new president is urging greater engagement with the West, but will the West reciprocate. What will America's response to Iran's nuclear programme under a moderate leader be? Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, authors of a new book, 'Going to Tehran', which challenges all the conventional wisdom about Iran and its nuclear programme, argue that Iran would like to engage...
Richard Pithouse -
In 1652, the year that Jan van Riebeck first stepped on to these shores, Gerrad Winstanley, an English radical, published a pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Three years earlier he had led a land occupation on St. George's Hill in Surrey. The occupation had aimed, against the growing enclosure of common lands for private profit to insist that “the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again”. It was quickly and violently crushed.
The pamphlet that Winstanley published...
Ebrahim Hewitt, senior editor of the Middle East Monitor, has been writing letters to the editors of major western newspapers since 2009. His letters, which are a response to what newspapers publish about Israel’s 65-year occupation of Palestine, remained largely unpublished until recently when he was encouraged to compile them into a book form.
In this Frontline Club panel discussion, Hewitt’s book, Memo to the Editor, is used as a vehicle for a broader discussion of how the...
Dale T. McKinley -
Here’s a sobering fact: none of us, whether in South Africa or in most any other democratic country for that matter, really knows what our government security-intelligence agencies (‘spooks’ for short) are up to; and, that is exactly the way the spooks want to keep it.
That’s why the recent actions of Edward Snowden - a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the United States CIA and employee of various defence contractors who worked at the government’s...
