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?
Al Jazeera has released the second of a four-part series that reveals how a secret pact formed a cartel, the Seven Sisters, which controls the world's oil. At the end of the 1960s, the world’s major oil companies controlled 85 percent of the world's oil reserves. Today, they control just 10 percent. New hunting grounds are therefore required, and the Sisters have turned their gaze towards Africa. In their bid to dominate Africa, the Sisters installed a king in Libya, a dictator in...
Chip Berlet -
If we want to understand the genesis of much Islamic terrorism by a small handful of Muslims, a speculative tour of their apocalyptic worldview may help us design a more effective response.
Walk a mile in the shoes of those who claim to honor God and yet cheer the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
They represent only a tiny fraction of the Muslims on our planet, yet they see themselves as carrying out the will of God. Fanatics such as these can be found in many of the World’s...
Dale T. McKinley -
God (of the Christian variety) runs deep in the veins of the ANC.
Ever since its founding conference in 1912 was opened by a prayer and the singing of Enoch Sontonga’s Christian anthem - ‘Nkosi Sikele’ i-Afrika (‘God Bless Africa’) - and ended with the election of a leadership dominated by Christian preachers/theologians, the ANC has, with varying degrees of intensity and application, embraced and invoked its and its leaders ‘special’...
People are talking a lot about inequality these days. It continues to grow within and between countries. The world's total wealth has been estimated at US$223 trillion. The richest one percent has accumulated 43% of this wealth. Simultaneously, there is a growing gap between rich and poor countries. Two hundred years ago rich countries were only three times richer than poor countries. Today they are about 80 times richer. Much of this can be attributed to the unfair rules of the global...
Richard Pithouse -
In his speech at the memorial service for the soldiers who were killed in the Central African Republic Jacob Zuma presented us, and not for the first time, with the idea that we should receive another accumulation of bodies – of black bodies – as a tragedy, as a cruel consequence of the random movement of the wheel of fortune. Thabo Mbeki, watching our steady accretion of 'tragedies' from the sidelines, might, perhaps, have recalled a line from Shakespeare: “Our remedies oft...
Alex Kane -
WikiLeaks strikes again. The whistleblowing website has released 1.7 million cables dating from 1973-1976 that shine a bright light on US foreign policy.
WikiLeaks says the documents were obtained from Freedom of Information requests and the State Department’s “systematic declassification review.” WikiLeaks is calling it the Public Library of US Diplomacy. The organization has now published the cables on their website in a searchable format, saying it is “the...
