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?
WikiLeaks has published the secret text to part of the biggest U.S. trade deal in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). For the past several years, the United States and 12 Pacific Rim nations have been negotiating behind closed doors on the sweeping agreement. A 95-page draft of a TPP chapter released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday details agreements relating to patents, copyright, trademarks and industrial design, showing their wide-reaching implications for Internet services, civil...
Dale T. McKinley -
“A council member told me we are too dirty to fish there … they are putting on a party to tell the world it is a beautiful country, but poor people are being trampled on.” That’s what Durban fisherman Khalil Adam told a journalist after hearing that he and thousands of fellow fisherfolk had been barred from Durban’s piers just a few months before South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
And, what was the reasoning behind Durban...
Richard Pithouse -
Being against [one form of] evil doesn't make you good.
- Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 1952
Over the last ten years or so there has been an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. The seemingly incorrigible elitism of the higher reaches of our public sphere has meant that, particularly in the absence of sustained formal organisation, popular protest has seldom won the right to represent itself in this space. For years the media, NGOs, academy and political...
On the first day of the U.N. Climate Meeting in Warsaw, young people from around the world joined with the newly formed Polish Youth Climate Network to release a climate video mocking the coal industry and promoting a clean energy future.
The title of the video, “Race for Energy Independence,” is a play on the Race for Independence, a running race that takes place on November 11 in Warsaw every year to commemorate Polish independence.
In the video, young people compete in a...
Glenn Ashton -
This week the latest round of climate negotiations, the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP19) is meeting in Warsaw Poland, to grapple with the stalled Climate Change Convention. At the opening of the conference Dr Alicia Illinga, a Filipina delegate highlighted how her country had already been hit by 22 typhoons this year. The devastating Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon to have ever made landfall, hit the Philippines on the eve of the conference, causing thousands of fatalities and...
Recent events have exposed the fact that the U.S. is performing blanket surveillance on any foreigner whose data passes through an American entity -- whether they are suspected of wrongdoing or not. This means that, essentially, every international user of the Internet is being watched. Finnish computer expert, Mikko Hypponen asks: How can we protect digital privacy in the age of government surveillance? He says, “If we need a big brother, I would rather have a domestic big brother than...
