August 2010

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Traditional Leaders in South Africa: Custom and Tradition in a Modern State?

Picture: Zizo Glenn Ashton - The recent announcement by President Zuma that certain traditional leadership positions would be not be continued when the incumbent leaders died was met by a remarkable lack of reaction and discussion in the media. A far more profound level of debate would certainly have happened in the affected rural areas where these chieftainships are to be phased out. Against the bigger picture this was a cosmetic change to traditional and customary practice in South Africa. Surely we must continue to...

Formalizing Israel's Land Grab

Picture: Bright Tal Chris Hedges - Time is running out for Israel. And the Israeli government knows it. The Jewish Diaspora, especially the young, has a waning emotional and ideological investment in Israel. The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel’s increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable. Desperate Israeli politicians, watching opposition to...

Americans Desperate for Public Housing

Video A report that highlights the desperation of poor Americans. According to this MSNBC report, last week 30,000 people turned up close to the city of Atlanta just to get an application form for public housing. People queued for hours in extremely hot weather, some passing out from heat exhaustion, simply for the opportunity to get onto the public housing waiting list. Notwithstanding the humiliation of having to wait for hours to collect application forms from a clearly disorganized housing...

Time for Broad Based Political Empowerment

Picture: Richie Duchon Richard Pithouse - Jacob Zuma has assured us that the “ANC will never do anything that undermines the spirit of the Constitution of the Republic and which erodes the dignity and rights of other people, regardless of their standing in society. ” This assurance rings more than a little hollow given that the media is already under serious threat, poor people’s movement are already facing serious repression, the police are already killing more people than they have at any time since the late...

John Pilger: WikiLeaks a Wake Up Call for Journalists

Video In this recent interview with Russia Today, progressive journalist, John Pilger, argues, "What WikiLeaks has done, is what journalists should have done." In his view, the WikiLeaks exposés might change journalism all together and if not change it, then at least wake it up. WikiLeaks has given us a sense of the "political disaster that is behind the human disaster in Afghanistan." It also highlights the need for "journalists to separate themselves from the...

South Africa: A Far Cry from the Marvel of the World Cup

Picture: Frames-of-mind Dale T. McKinley - It didn’t take long did it? Despite the lingering stupor, just a month after the end of the constructed mega-hype of the Soccer World Cup, South Africa is firmly back in the reality trenches. With intensified public attention on important social and economic issues/debates, a host of strikes and re-energised political faction fighting taking centre stage, it seems an apt time to critically redirect some of the fading winter sunlight onto the political, economic and social state of the...