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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Moderate cleric and former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rouhani has won the recent Iranian presidential election. Iran's new president is urging greater engagement with the West, but will the West reciprocate. What will America's response to Iran's nuclear programme under a moderate leader be? Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, authors of a new book, 'Going to Tehran', which challenges all the conventional wisdom about Iran and its nuclear programme, argue that Iran would like to engage...
Richard Pithouse -
In 1652, the year that Jan van Riebeck first stepped on to these shores, Gerrad Winstanley, an English radical, published a pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Three years earlier he had led a land occupation on St. George's Hill in Surrey. The occupation had aimed, against the growing enclosure of common lands for private profit to insist that “the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again”. It was quickly and violently crushed.
The pamphlet that Winstanley published...
Ebrahim Hewitt, senior editor of the Middle East Monitor, has been writing letters to the editors of major western newspapers since 2009. His letters, which are a response to what newspapers publish about Israel’s 65-year occupation of Palestine, remained largely unpublished until recently when he was encouraged to compile them into a book form.
In this Frontline Club panel discussion, Hewitt’s book, Memo to the Editor, is used as a vehicle for a broader discussion of how the...
Dale T. McKinley -
Here’s a sobering fact: none of us, whether in South Africa or in most any other democratic country for that matter, really knows what our government security-intelligence agencies (‘spooks’ for short) are up to; and, that is exactly the way the spooks want to keep it.
That’s why the recent actions of Edward Snowden - a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the United States CIA and employee of various defence contractors who worked at the government’s...
Gillian Schutte -
Poststructuralist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has argued that humans distinguish themselves from animals in the instant during which shit becomes something shameful. Thus it is the norm in ‘polite society’ that humans defecate in the privacy of a toilet in which their waste can be instantly flushed away. In fact toilet training is the foundation for teaching toddlers acceptable behaviour in society.
Yet, due to lack of sanitation services, over a third of humanity is still...
Ex-CIA intelligence analyst, Edward Snowden, joins Bradley Manning to become another whistle blower exposing the egregious overreach of the American surveillance state. Snowden leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper, which revealed worldwide surveillance of the Internet and online communication by the US National Security Agency (NSA) that has developed sophisticated technology, allowing it to spy not just on US citizens, but also on ordinary people all over the world.
The Obama...
