Is the African National Congress losing its best people to the newly formed rival Congress of the People? That is an argument being put forth in at least some circles. In response to another series of high-profile defections from the ANC to COPE Dirk Smit, Speaker of the City of Cape Town municipality, has asserted that […]
Helen Suzman, longtime stalwart of the Progressive Party and its various iterations (the Progressive Reform Party, the Progressive Federal Party), passed away on Thursday at the age of 91. Suzman was a long-time thorn in the side of the National Party, and if the Progressives’ anti-Apartheid bona fides have sometimes been overstated, her commitment to changing […]
I apologize for my absent of late as I was spending the holidays way up in Alaska with my family, including my new niece. There has been much happening in our Central Asian region of the world and I will try to discuss all the recent happenings as soon as possible. Before the holidays took […]
General Summary: It is nearly impossible to provide a cogent summary of a year in the life of a continent as vast and as diverse as Africa. With more than four dozen nation states, about a billion people, and vast geographic scope, it is impossible and even foolhardy to try to encapsulate the continent with […]
said Ismail Haniya today, after 225 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza. The Israeli military initiative was a response to increased rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel; Defense Minister Ehud Barak is leaving open the possibility of a ground offensive. The United States has taken a strong anti-Hamas stance in the debaucle […]
On Sunday Ghanaians will go to the polls again to vote in their country's presidential runoff election after neither of the two main contenders achieved 50% of the vote earlier this month in Ghana's national elections. Nana Akufo-Addo, a lawyer running for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) faces off against John Atta-Mills, a law professor representing the opposition National […]
As if circumstances are not difficult in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country has now seen a new outbreak of Ebola. The DRC is a country that never seems to catch a break and rarely makes its own good fortune.
What is it about the Caucasus crisis, now submerged below the sightline of international attention, that we need to remember as we close out 2008? For one thing, recall that now there are Russian troops in South Ossetia, where there were none last August. Second, consider that soon there will be no observers from the […]
Links: International Journal of Socialist Review has put together the “exchange” between respected Africanists Mahmood Mamdani and Patrick Bond over the situation in Zimbabwe that stems from Bond's rigorous response to an article (also included, indeed it is Mamdani's contribution to the exchange) Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books. You can access other articles on […]
This week the Egyptian Government selected Bechtel Corporation to advise on the construction of Egypt's first set of nuclear power plants in a 10-year, $180 million contract. This is good news for Egypt and the United States. Egypt has a long standing policy that the Middle East should be WMD-free. In a joint press conference […]
Imagine a country where people are forced to give up gas (petrol) and had to opt for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to save money, because the price of petrol had become too expensive for the public. It costs about 30, 000 on average to have the car equipped with the kind of equipment that makes […]
The New Republic has an editorial on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The editors argue for vigorous action on the part of The West and use as their justification the Rwandan links with the nightmare in the eastern DRC and the West's very inaction during the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Both […]
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