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?
Elisabeth Garber-Paul -
If the center-left Labor Party PvdA had won, or the Socialists, who made pot legalization a centerpiece of their campaign, there would be no question about the future of the world-famous Dutch coffeeshops, at least in the short term, and their ability to serve pot to visitors to Holland.
But alas, the conservative leader Mark Rutte will be the next Dutch prime minister. Rutte's free-market VVD party won 41 seats in Parliament, versus 38 for the Labor Party, which came in...
David Bruce -
This article is written in collaboration with the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum.President Zuma has appointed Judge Ian Farlam to head up a Commission of Inquiry into the massacre at Marikana. But is it the appropriate mechanism for dealing with the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed about Marikana: The fact that more than 34 people were killed by police on 16 August in circumstances that were, to put it in the mildest terms, highly questionable?
Commissions of...
Scott Barry Kaufman -
Four-year-old Heidi Hankins was all over the news earlier this year. According to the Daily Mail, she "has an IQ of 159 -- only one point below Albert Einstein's -- and has become one of the youngest members of Mensa." As her father has pointed out, she has always shown an intense need for intellectual stimulation, bursting at the mouth to speak at birth, acquiring vocabulary by the age of one, and voraciously reading through all 30 books in the Oxford Reading...
Washington has condemned the killing of its ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other officials - who died when an armed mob attacked the US consulate in Benghazi. The bloodshed followed protests over an American film, which has been described as an insult to Islam. RT talks to Lindsay German from the British Stop the War Coalition. She contends that the the making of the film was a provocative act, but that the protests could not have taken off in this manner if there was not...
Richard Pithouse -
In her recently republished autobiography Emma Mashinini, the grand old lady of the trade union movement, ascribes the deep roots of her steadfast political commitment to a desire to assert that: “I am human. I exist. I am a complete person.”
This may strike some people as naïve in a country where many of the discourses contending for influence in the elite public sphere are frequently weighed down with the dead hand of stolid jargon, mediated through everything from...
Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise of “change” during his first term as president of the US, but many disgruntled Americans would still re-elect him for a second term because he is the “lesser evil”. However, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report contends that Obama is the “more effective evil” because his Democratic base lets him get away with things that the Republicans are unable to get away with.
On the issue of foreign policy, he contends,...
