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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?
The African Union (AU) met in Pretoria this week. Columbia University professor and Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani is interviewed by Democracy Now. He gives his take on the regional and global implications of NATO’s intervention in Libya, which he says threatens to increase the militarization of the African continent.
Mamdani argues,"The contention over Africa has become intense over the last decade. There has almost been a complete reversal of positions that existed during the...
Conn Hallinan -
Is current U.S. foreign policy in Africa following a blueprint drawn up almost eight years ago by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the world? Although it seems odd that a Democratic administration would have anything in common with the extremists at Heritage, the convergence in policy and practice between the two is disturbing.
Heritage, with help from Joseph Coors and the Scaife Foundations, was founded in 1973 by the late Paul Weyrich, one of...
Liepollo Pheko -
Africa is again becoming a “country” in the popular discourse of Western media intent on rebranding the entire continent as the eternal basket case.
Despite North Africa’s Arab Spring (which has inspired a global movement against corrupt and undemocratic leadership) and the birth of Africa’s 54th state, Southern Sudan (the result of the Sudanese people’s will expressed via a referendum), the idea of Africa as an uninterrupted landscape of human suffering...
Pepe Escobar -
His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.
Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter - once again - that wilderness of mirrors that is the "war on terror", as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's...
The NATO intervention in Libya has been a huge blow to international law, says Phyllis Bennis of Washington DC based, Institute for Policy Studies. The legitimacy of the United Nations as well as the legitimacy of any idea of international responsibility has been shredded through this Libyan intervention, she contends.
Editor's Note: You might also be interested in additional reporting from the The Real News Network, NATO Tries to Control Libyan Revolution and "Boots on the Ground"...
Glen Ford -
The African Union found the spine to reject execution of an arrest warrant against Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi issued by the International Criminal Court, which appears to have an “Africans only” indictment policy. The AU’s chairman calls the court’s prosecutions “discriminatory” because they ignore the West’s crimes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. China has hosted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, another ICC arrest target.
The African Union...
