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?
Visit the archives.
Noam Chomsky -
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian...
The world's wealthy countries often criticise African nations for corruption - especially as perpetrated by the continent's government and business leaders who abuse their positions by looting tens of billions of dollars in national assets or the profits from state-owned enterprises that could otherwise be used to relieve the plight of some of the world's poorest peoples.
Yet even as the West condemns these practices, it also helps make them possible. Dirty money is channelled to banks in...
In this panel discussion hosted, shortly after American President Barack Obama was re-elected, Jeff Faux Founder and Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC contends, "One of the realities of this election was that it wasn't so much an Obama victory as it was a Romney and Republican defeat. Given the state of the economy, the Republicans should have won…They didn't because they've gone just too far to the right for the people to stomach…So I...
Saliem Fakir -
Hurricane Sandy demonstrated how a large-scale catastrophic weather event, like Hurricane Katrina of 2005, is not a once-off incident, but a recurrent phenomenon.
Extreme weather has the potential to set off other crises and disasters too. Japan’s tsunami was quickly followed by the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown magnifying the scale of the disaster from a single extreme event to a multi-crisis economically transformative event -- demonstrated in Japan now debating the use of...
Mark Weisbrot -
President Obama’s re-election was never much in doubt, except perhaps briefly when he took a plunge after the first debate and we didn’t know where the bottom was. But by the end of the campaign, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was giving Obama a better than 99 percent chance of winning. Nate Silver of the New York Times, more cautious, put the odds yesterday at about 90-10 in favor of Obama.
Those who point to the popular vote as evidence of a very tight contest,...
Does Brainstorming Work?
This is the question psychologists have been baffled by for nearly half a century and we're still on the path of discovering whether brainstorming is a technique that extracts the best out of people or if it's a method that suppresses creativity.
Journalist and author, Jonah Lehrer, argues that brainstorming produces less original ideas than those people who work by themselves.
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