President Obama publicly confirmed Monday that the United States will oppose any attempt by the Palestinians to achieve statehood at the United Nations, but Palestinians leaders are still vowing to move ahead with their bid for statehood this week. What will the ramifications of a U.S. veto be? For more, Democracy Now speak with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus, Noam Chomsky. “If the Palestinians do bring the issue to the Security Council and the US vetoes it,...
Mandisi Majavu - Reading the 11th Commission for Employment Equity (CEE) Annual Report, which details the status of employment equity in South Africa, I was reminded of a report that Dr Sabie Surtee and Professor Martin Hall wrote two years ago. In that report titled, ‘Transformation: African People in the Western Cape’, Dr Surtee and Professor Hall conclude that the labour market in South Africa remains “highly inequitable.” Two years later, the 11th CEE Annual Report makes similar...
Richard Pithouse - The words that escaped from Darren Scott's private life and crashed into the public realm via an argument in a bar are no unique perversion. For anyone with any doubts about the extent to which white racism not only spills over into the new order but also continues to reinvent itself the comments sections on news and analysis websites, spaces that enable public anonymity, make for dispiriting reading. But with the exception of extreme figures like Steve Hofmeyer white racism is a...
In the run up to 9/11, high ranking CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence (head of the CIA), George Tenet, were aware that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered America in the year 2000. However, they withheld this information from the FBI and "more or less lied" about it to the US Congress and the 9/11 Commission in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism adviser to the Bush...
INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Participants are challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images are made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. JR, innovator and collaborator in the INSIDE OUT...
Maude Barlow - Recently, I had the honour of speaking at a fundraiser for the victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa, organized by local health-care providers Dr. Farook Hossenbux and his nurse and partner Geri Hossenbux. Speakers included a representative from Doctors Without Borders, local groups raising money for the cause and local artists. Several mentioned the phenomenon of "donor fatigue" in this case and puzzled about why it was so hard to raise money for a crisis threatening as many...