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?
While studying future alternatives for China’s global relations, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has come to an ominous conclusion: conflict is looming. As China's global ambitions grow, it finds itself on a collision course with the United States. How can this be avoided? Rudd is a long-time student of China, with a unique vantage point to watch its power rise in the past few decades. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Chinese culture, language and history he argues that the...
Steven Friedman -
If that well-worn cliché about never wasting a crisis applies to anything, it is the labour movement today. Contrary to some current rhetoric, the movement does not need to return to what it was: it needs to become something different.
Deepening tensions in Cosatu, which saw the departure of the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) and now general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi, have inevitably conjured up nostalgia for its past. As the Cosatu central executive abandons internal...
Tim Radford -
LONDON − The official target of limiting global warming to a 2 degrees Celsius rise has been described by a senior scientist as “utterly inadequate” to protect the people most at risk from climate change.
That’s the conclusion reached by one of the authors of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report, in an analysis of the political tussle between rich and poor nations at last December’s UN conference on limiting temperature...
Many in the West believe that the destiny of the human race is to embrace Western liberal democratic values. This may or may not be true, but it partially explains why Washington and its allies are so willing to overthrow governments around the world, even if they are democratically elected -- and their favourite tool is the NGO. Peter Lavelle of RT's Cross Talk hosts a discussion on how NGOs are used to encourage regime change in countries that Western powers deem problematic. He is joined...
Dreading April Fools Day? Perhaps you should. People have been playing April Fools' pranks for centuries. In fact, the earliest recorded pranks and hoaxes associated with the first day of April go back to the fourteenth century. This year, comedian John Oliver of Last Week Tonight fame urges his fans to take the April Fools’ Day “No Prank Pledge”. Anyone who is excited about April Fools Day is probably a sociopath, he jokes. “We don't need a special holiday to...
Anna Majavu -
Does the ANC intend to expropriate any land any time soon? President Jacob Zuma doesn’t appear to care for the landless at all. He doesn’t seem to believe that landlessness is even a problem.
Zuma caused alarm last week when he claimed that South Africans were going hungry and living in squalid conditions because they were too lazy to work the land or build their own houses. This was a reminder of the attitude of the previous Thabo Mbeki administration, under which people...
