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?
SACSIS seeks to examine global issues, particularly as they relate to South Africa.
Manuel Garcia, Jr. -
The loss of Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-200 has raised many doubts among the flying public and even some aviation professionals about the safety of the newest generation of passenger airplanes. These new airliners have composite materials replacing metal for many structural elements and control surfaces, and they are reliant on computer-controlled flight and navigation systems.
The impetus for developing this new generation of airliners is the need to improve fuel economy so as to...
Saliem Fakir -
Think Darfur, think genocide and then straight to China. Think Tiananmen Square, think China and repression. Think Africa, think neo-colonialism, think China. Think Tibet, think the Dalai Lama and the South African government buckling under Chinese government pressure, denying the Dalai Lama entry.
Think Wal-Mart, cheap labour and the countless Chinese suppliers producing cheap goods for US consumers. Think Google, think censure, as Google bends to the Chinese government's pressure to block...
Stephen Zunes -
Editor's Note: You may also be interested in reading Stephen Zunes follow up article: "Iran's Stolen Election Has Sparked an Uprising -- What Should the U.S. Do?" There's also this superb must-read article by M K Bhadrakumar from Asia Times Online "Beijing Cautions US Over Iran." The article is extremely valuable for its demystification of internal Iranian politics and how the US consistently misreads this.
***
It is certainly not unprecedented for Western...
Democracy Now -
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama followed up his trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany Friday, where 56,000 people were killed during World War II. Obama invoked his great-uncle who had helped liberate a Buchenwald prison camp and returned a haunted man here at home. He also strongly criticized anyone who denies the Holocaust and said Buchenwald, quote, “teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own...
Dedrick Muhammad -
The black love affair with President Barack Obama is stronger than with any figure in the post-civil rights era. According to a recent New York Times poll, President Obama enjoys a 96% approval rating among African Americans. As an African American myself, I too feel pride and joy in seeing one of us succeed and attain so much respect and acclaim in the United States, a country with such a strong and recent history of racist oppression and alienation.
I also appreciate having such a...
Tara Lohan -
Last month, the world got a glimpse of an epidemic that has hit India in the last decade when news reports alerted readers to the suicides of 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh.
But this has been only a fraction of the suicides committed by farmers since 1997, says Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., a physicist, environmentalist, feminist, science policy advocate and director of Navdanya and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology.
While initial news reports blamed the...
