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?
Karly Curcio -
Foreign aid programs continue to pour funds into what seems like Africa’s bottomless bucket. Illicit financial flows out of Africa are twice the amount of foreign aid into the region. Between 1970 and 2008, according to a study by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), illicit flows from Africa totaled at least $854 billion, and could reach as high as $1.8 trillion when taking into account missing data from certain countries and other conduits of illicit flows not captured in the study....
In Thailand, the government has rejected an offer by anti-government protesters to enter talks after a bloody week in Bangkok that's left at least 38 protesters dead. Some fear the standoff could lead to an undeclared civil war. The protesters are mostly rural and urban poor who are part of a group called the UDD, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, more commonly known as the Red Shirts. Is the Red Shirt movement a genuine grassroots struggle, or a front for the ousted former...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa has a crime problem. The resounding call from society is to incarcerate criminals, to remove them from the population.
Given increasing spending on the justice system, putting more police on the ground, the inevitable result is increasing numbers of criminals entering prison. Prisons become ever more overcrowded and are struggling to cope despite new institutions being built.
Our Department of Correctional Services (DCS) has come in for some heavy criticism over the...
Jewish-American intellectual, Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was denied entry into Israel on Sunday. Chomsky was due to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah.
Chomsky's lecture would have covered American foreign and domestic policy.
He spoke with Al Jazeera about the reasons Israel denied him entry. In his words, there were two reasons:
1) "The government of Israel does not like the kind of...
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen -
Do government departments pay any attention to what the auditor general recommends?
How our government manages its finances is an issue that always stirs up a huge amount of emotions and public debate. Unfortunately, for South Africans, improving public finance management adheres to the adage “one step forward, two steps back.”
Each year, the Auditor-General (AG) conducts an audit of the expenditure of government departments. Despite the fact that few departments receive wholly...
As thousands of gallons of oil continue to spew daily from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, representatives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton were grilled by lawmakers in back-to-back hearings in Washington on Tuesday. Industry executives from all three corporations began with prepared testimony that involved blaming each other for the explosion and deflecting responsibility for the unfolding environmental and economic disaster. In the clip above, Democracy Now airs excerpts of...
