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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On the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, a team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts and physicians has released a massive new report about the Iraq War’s impact.
"The Costs of War" report found the total number of people who have died from the war, including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and Iraqi civilians, has reached at least 189,000 people, including at least 123,000 civilians....
Everything the donating public has been taught about giving is dysfunctional, says AIDS Ride founder Dan Pallotta. Too many nonprofits, he says, are rewarded for how little they spend -- not for what they get done.
Instead of equating frugality with morality, he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses). In this bold talk, he says: Let's change the way we think about changing the world.
© TED
The market for smart phones is now dominated by two companies. Apple Inc. is the biggest corporation in the field, followed by the South Korean headquartered Samsung. But the two companies have been engaged in a legal battle over patent rights for more than a year and their battle looks set to obstruct innovation. Patent law is frequently understood as a mechanism to safeguard the rewards for innovation. But companies who employ batteries of lawyers and spend hundreds of millions of dollars...
Human beings have been campaigning against inequality and poverty for 3,000 years - but this journey is accelerating contends celebrity activist, Bono. In this TED talk, Bono dazzles with selective data sets, which based on trends in a few African countries, show that the end of poverty may be in sight. According to Bono, if the world continues on its current trajectory, the number of people living on less than a US$1,25 a day is set to be eliminated by 2028.
© TED
Due to the growth of social networking on the Internet, we no longer have to react to emotions in real time," says Cliff Nass, professor of communications at Stanford University. Faces and voices are the most descriptive forms of emotion, and new research suggests that heavy users of social media are less able to assess emotion successfully, leading to "emotional atrophy", the difficulty to understand and process emotions in real time.
Social media has now become the...
Section 27 of the South African Constitution guarantees the right to food. However, if one tracks the impact of inflation on the poor, one finds that their purchasing power is being eroded because the basket of goods on which the CPI is based is determined by the middle class and the elites, argues Isobel Frye, director of the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute (SPII).
Worse, poor South Africans face even greater prejudices. Her organisation's research has found that the goods...
