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?
Three-time Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter and Vietnam War veteran, Oliver Stone, has made numerous acclaimed films, including Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, W., and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. Now Stone and historian Peter Kuznick from American University have teamed up to produce a 10-part Showtime series titled “Untold History of the United States”.
Stone talks about the significance of understanding that moment in history...
Norman Solomon -
The Nobel Peace Prize that President Obama received 40 months ago has emerged as the most appalling Orwellian award of this century. No, war is not peace.
George Carlin used to riff about oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp,” “genuine imitation,” “political science” and “military intelligence.” But humor is of the gallows sort when we consider the absurdity and tragedy of the world’s most important peace prize honoring the world’s top...
Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise of “change” during his first term as president of the US, but many disgruntled Americans would still re-elect him for a second term because he is the “lesser evil”. However, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report contends that Obama is the “more effective evil” because his Democratic base lets him get away with things that the Republicans are unable to get away with.
On the issue of foreign policy, he contends,...
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews South Africa’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, who attended the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Rasool discusses the Obama presidency, the militarization of Africa, Islamophobia, the Marikana massacre and his 2006 meeting with then-Senator Obama in South Africa.
With respect to Marikana he says, "I believe, at the end of the day, the kind of compromises we made in 1994 are coming back to haunt us. I...
John Pilger -
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation located midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean.
The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and...
Chris Hedges -
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.
The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,”...
