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?
Heidi-Jane Esakov -
Mido Macia, a 27-year-old Mozambican immigrant to South Africa was found dead in his police cell in Daveyton, east of Johannesburg, on 26 February 2013. In a brutal scene captured on film by onlookers, Macia, with hands bound and tied to the back of a police van, was dragged 500 metres by police officers. His torture continued in a police cell with allegations of brutal beatings.
His crime: blocking traffic and resisting arrest.
Three days before that, on 23 February, 30-year-old Arafat...
John Feffer -
The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state.
The experience inside the main part of the museum is quite interactive. You can put on headphones and...
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...
David Bruce -
If one wants to understand the common thread behind police brutality in South Africa, the cruelty that last week killed taxi driver Mido Macia, the massacre of the miners at Marikana or the killing of Andries Tatane, it is helpful to go back to the ANC’s 2009 election manifesto.
The manifesto largely rehashes old ideas. But in describing how the ANC will “intensify the fight against crime and corruption” there is one word in the manifesto that is relevant to understanding...
Tom Astley -
With a worn nylon-string guitar cradled in his arms, and a weary kind of smile on his face, Ricardo laments the state of contemporary Cuban music making in surprisingly bleak terms. He’s a professional rock musician; a graduate of the prestigious Havana Institute of Arts, a gigging guitarist, a man who has made a career from popular music that, if not always well-paid, is at least regarded in Cuba as a respectable profession; a Cuban profession, even.
Defining a national...
Oxfam has released a comprehensive report that measures how the world's 10 largest food companies perform on food justice issues. The 10 companies Oxfam scores are Associated British Foods, Coca Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, Pepsico and Unilever. Collectively, these companies make $1 billion a day. Oxfam based its report on seven social and environmental indicators in the food production chain: Small-scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate...
