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?
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges discusses what could mark the most significant government intrusion on the freedom of the press. America’s Justice Department has acknowledged seizing the work, home and cellphone records used by almost 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press. The phones targeted included the general AP office numbers in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, and the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press...
In February this year Private First Class Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to sending restricted documents to WikiLeaks in violation of military regulations, making him the source of the largest intelligence leak in US history. In his statement to the court he talked about "revealing the true costs of war".
Ahead of his trial in June, a panel of media and human rights specialists, including former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, Al Jazeera's Richard Gizbert, New...
Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson, challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
In this funny, stirring TED Talk, he outlines three principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. Robinson tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest...
How did the financial crash in Iceland inspire the Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements? Why did the Arab Spring in North Africa end with Islamists running Egypt? How did the peaceful movement against a dictatorship in Syria degenerate into an all out civil war?
World famous Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, best known for his research on the information society, communication and globalization, talks about the emergence and characteristics of new social movements around...
John Capel of the Bench Marks Foundation talks about the efforts of his organisation to widen the scope of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (also known as the Farlam Commission), such that the investigation goes beyond and behind the killings of the 34 striking mineworkers, which shocked the world last year, to the socio-economic root causes of the strikes in the Rustenburg mining belt.
A study by the Bench Marks Foundation, first released in 2007 and later updated in 2011, shows huge...
On Syria, Robert Fisk says, “We’d like to see a democracy, wouldn’t we? But although the word ‘democracy’ has a bad taste and a ring in it for many Arab Muslims, for good reason. We’d like to see some kind of freedom and dignity, which is what Syrians originally asked for before the massive peaceful protests on the streets—they weren’t completely peaceful, but they were pretty peaceful—turned into armed militia, government forces battles....
