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?
In recent years there has been great volatility in food prices including a dramatic rise in the period June 2007- June 2008, when the global food price index nearly doubled.
The United Nations found that steep increases in food prices in 2008 led to malnourishment for 130 million additional people.
In the second half of 2010, food prices rose sharply again, nearly doubling in the case of wheat and increasing more than 60% in the case of maize. Right now in the world economy, we are...
Fazila Farouk -
In recent weeks, two meetings of global significance have come and gone with little media attention. At the end of January, the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting took place in Davos, Switzerland, followed days later by the World Social Forum (WSF) in Dakar, Senegal, which ended on an ecstatic note on the very day people’s power triumphed over Egypt’s autocratic Mubarak regime.
The Davos forum was, of course, covered by the bigger television networks, but there was none of...
Richard Pithouse -
Life, ordinary life, is meant to follow certain rhythms. We grow, seasons change and we assume new positions in the world. When you have finished being a child you put away childish things and move on to the next stage of life. But there is a multitude of people in this world who cannot build a home, marry and care for their children and aging parents. There is a multitude of people who are growing older as they remain stuck in an exhausting limbo, perhaps just managing to scrape together the...
Egypt has essentially been a military dictatorship since 1952, argues Gilbert Achcar professor of development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His most recent book is the Arabs and the holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.
The backbone of the political system has been and continues to be the army that seized power after a civil uprising against the British-backed monarchy that coincidentally erupted on 26 January 1952, almost exactly...
Katie Halper -
I first heard of Jeff Halper at Israel-Palestine-related events, where people would ask me if I was related to him. It took me 30 seconds of Googling to realize that I’d love to be related to this Minnesotan anthropologist, activist, writer, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and founder and coordinator of Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions (ICAHD).
Though kindred spirits, we don’t seem to come from the same Halper stock. But we are Facebook friends, and it was through a...
As Haiti prepares for a presidential run off in March, thousands are protesting against a three month extension to outgoing president, René Préval's term.
In November 2010, Haiti held a presidential election. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, an economic think tank in Washington DC, contends that the US government, using the Organisation of American States as a political instrument, forced the government of Haiti to change the...
