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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Mandisi Majavu -
Many sports journalists view Solly Tyibilika’s rugby career, the former Springbok player who was shot dead at a tavern in Gugulethu, as a waste of talent. It is said that Tyibilika could play like a champion if you could get him on the field. Loffie Eloff, a rugby coach, is quoted in the newspapers as saying that Tyibilika had “discipline problems”. “He’d just disappear for days, even weeks, on end.”
Tyibilika’s friends...
Dale T. McKinley -
The ANC might be about to turn 100 years old but when it comes to its contemporary politics, the last four years seems like a lifetime of its own. It was four years ago, almost to the day, that the ANC gathered at the now infamous Polokwane Congress and when it was all over the general view both inside and outside the ANC that it marked a fundamental ‘turn’ for the ANC and the country; not simply in respect of a new national and ANC leadership but more crucially, in respect of the...
A NASA airborne laboratory, flying out of Punta Arenas in southern Chile, is conducting the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice caps.
With plans to map three-dimensional views of the Antarctic region and armed with sophisticated radar and altimeter lasers, "Operation Ice Bridge" will enable scientists to compare ice sheets' thickness from one year to the next which will help determining how quickly the ocean may rise.
The study will produce similar data on the Arctic...
Michelle Pressend -
As the 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change starts winding up, people all over the world are being told to reign in their expectations. COP 17 will likely not result in a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, but does look set to become the launch pad for the new Green Climate Fund (GCF), also known by climate justice activists as the "Greedy Corporate Fund".
Since COP17 is floundering and Kyoto targets seem a distant dream, South...
Environmental groups in Durban have staged a series of actions in recent days calling on world leaders to agree to a just climate change deal.
Democracy Now! got an inside look at one action staged by Greenpeace to hang a banner off of a Durban hotel where a meeting of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development was taking place, bringing together representatives from a number of large corporations and delegates to the U.N. Climate Change Conference. The banner read:...
Glenn Ashton -
There is deep scepticism as to whether the COP 17 meeting in Durban will achieve much at all. Why is it that such an urgent matter has taken so long to achieve so little at such great cost? Despite constant refrains from the global public, backed by scientific experts, there appears neither inclination nor momentum to solve this problem.
The biggest reason that resolution of this essentially straightforward problem is stalled is because the economic forces of private capital have usurped and...
