By BUSISO MOYO Everyone seems to have an interest in food policy these days, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, to the G8 with its New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, to social movements, civil society networks and those who simply care about what…
By ALEXANDER O’RIORDAN What happened in the South African Parliament last week was a carefully engineered spectacle of power Last week’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) and the subsequent fallout is being voraciously dissected in the press. Most of the analysis, however, is on what the media presumes are unintended consequences of President Jacob…
By MANDISI MAJAVU Early this month, Serena Williams wrote an article for TIME magazine announcing that she has decided to end her 14-year boycott of the Indian Wells tennis tournament. The last time she played at the tournament in 2001, she was subjected to racial abuse. She recounts the whole incident in chapter four of her autobiography, My life:…
Nothing Changes Until Something Big Happens By SALIEM FAKIR Last week the Mining Indaba came and went just like it does every year. Some 7,000 people attended. On its margins, outside of the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), a different kind of mining indaba, a people’s indaba, took place in close by Woodstock. This…
Harvard University surgeon, Dr Mark G. Shrime, MD MPH FACS, has proved that anybody can publish fake medical research for a fee of about $500. While they won’t get it used in respectable medicals journals accredited by PubMed, there are many legitimate looking publications online that will publish anything supposedly scientific, as long as the…
By ANNA MAJAVU The Tripartite Alliance’s support of the BDS Movement is weakened by the ruling party’s confusing stance on Israel/Palestine Amongst the audience in Parliament’s public gallery for President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) was a Palestinian freedom icon who carried with her the hopes of all Palestinians that the ANC…
This post arrived in my inbox yesterday and as we publish a number of websites using WordPress I was interested in how sophisticated and devious these hack attacks are becoming. Mark Maunder CEO and founder of Wordfence, a cybersecurity plugin for WordPress, comments on the Forbes hack attack and even though he explains that the…
By PENNY SWIFT President Barack Obama has been labeled “a President in denial” after stating in a recorded interview (watch below) that the media overstates terror threats. In addition, an Israeli Government Minister has accused the President of ignoring the reality of Islamist terrorism. In stark contrast, the United Nations (UN) Office on Drugs and…
Many schools in the state still have no policies or rules around pinning kids down This story by Heather Vogell, written for ProPublica, unearths some of the barbaric practices that are being used today in a country that is supposedly the leader of the free world. The State of Virginia is at least making a move…
The US Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) committee on the Diagnostic Criteria for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) has recommended that the name ME/CFS be changed to Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease (SEID). It has also recommended that the disease be assigned a new code in the current WHO International Classification of Diseases, tenth edition (ICD-10). In addition,…
