NewsTrust - Africa - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Greenpeace Director Kumi Naidoo, From Anti-Apartheid Activist to Leading Voice for Climate Justice

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Dec. 05 (Interview) - We speak to Naidoo about the climate summit and the link between his anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s and his environmental work today. "The problem is, the level of ambition and the level of urgency being exhibited in these talks do not match what the science is telling us to do," says Naidoo. "We are seeing in Africa—in the Horn of Africa with the drought, the conflict in Darfur, the devastation that African women farmers are facing all over our continent—that climate change impacts are taking lives right now. So in that context, we feel that there has to be a much greater sense of urgency to move the agenda forward."

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Colbert Nails Rush Limbaugh Over Obama Christian Killing Accusations (VIDEO)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stephen Colbert - Oct. 20 (Comedy News) - On Wednesday night's "Report," Stephen Colbert featured a segment on the inflammatory radio host's recent on-air claim that Obama is sending troops to Uganda for the purpose of "wiping out Christians." Explaining that the "Christian" group Lord's Resistance Army promotes an objective "to remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people," Limbaugh left out that the LRA has terrorized the people of Uganda and other countries for over 25 years by abducting children, brainwashing them and forcing them to become sex slaves as well as torturers and executioners.

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TED Fellows Friday with Jon Gosier

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TED - By Alana Herro - Jun. 25 (Interview) - To help journalists and emergency responders, Jon Gosier is developing SwiftRiver, a platform that sorts massive amounts of web and SMS data for accuracy. With his Ugandan innovation hub Appfrica standing on its own two feet, Jon has moved back to the US. Co-Founder of metaLayer, a company that adds visual data to real world scenarios, Jon continues to translate meta-data into digestible pieces applicable to users’ lives.

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North Africa revolts could weaken Al Shabaab - GlobalPost (blog)

Fri, 13 May 2011 11:12:35 -0700

GlobalPost - May. 13 - StarAfrica.comNorth Africa revolts could weaken Al ShabaabGlobalPost (blog)Rawlings said the uprisings in North Africa are weakening Somalia's Islamic extremist rebels. He did not name any specific countries but there have been reports that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi regime has been funding and sending weapons to Al Shabaab. ...AU Envoy: North Africa Uprisings Crippling Somalia RebelsVoice of Americaall 240 news articles »

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Libya and the World of Oil

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Noam Chomsky - Apr. 05 (Opinion) - In Egypt and Tunisia, the popular uprising has won impressive victories, but as the Carnegie Endowment reported, the regimes remain and are “seemingly determined to curb the pro-democracy momentum generated so far. A change in ruling elites and system of governance is still a distant goal” – and one that the West will seek to keep far removed.

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Obama’s Missionless War

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

National Review - By Mark Steyn - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - The “Arab Spring” turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least consequential Arab dictatorship’s low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaeda sympathizers may be an artful if expensive piece of misdirection.

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The Slippery Slope Of Unilateralism

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Think Progress - By Matthew Yglesias - Mar. 14 (Opinion) - I had an interesting back and forth several years ago with Anne-Marie Slaughter, then a professor at Princeton, later policy planning director at the State Department, and now back to academia about an old line from something she wrote where she said “the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.”

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Behind the Arab Revolt Is a Word We Dare Not Speak

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

truth-out.org - By John Pilger - Feb. 24 (Opinion) - "How did they get away with it?" I asked. "The press allowed the crazies to get away with it." "Who are the crazies?" "The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in 'Mein Kampf,'" said McGovern. "These are the same people who were referred to, in the circles in which I moved at the top, as 'the crazies.'" I said: "Norman Mailer has written that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What's your view of that?" "Well ... I hope he's right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode."

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“Gaddafi Cares More for Himself and His Power than He Cares for Anybody in Libya”

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Abdulla Darrat, Amy Goodman - Feb. 22 (Opinion) - The Libyan government faces international condemnation for a vicious assault on the growing uprising against the four-decade rule of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. On Monday, Libyan troops and pro-government mercenaries attacked a large demonstration in the capital of Tripoli. Armed forces hunted down protesters in the streets, while Libyan warplanes and helicopters fired on them from above. The violence comes amidst more signs that Gaddafi's government is losing ground. On Monday, several Libyan officials broke with Gaddaffi, including the justice minister and the country's delegation to the United Nations. For more, we are joined by Libyan American activist Abdulla Darrat. “It really shows what over the last 40 years has become a country dominated by the megalomania of this one human being, who cares more for his self and his power than he cares for anybody in Libya,” Darrat says. [includes rush transcript]

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Uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt -- America Is Paying the Price for Supporting Corrupt Dictatorships in the Muslim World

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Juan Cole - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.

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Egypt: Will January 25 be the Day of the Egyptian Intifada?

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Global Voices - Jan. 23 (Opinion) - What is going to happen in Egypt on January 25? People are calling for demonstrations and sit-ins everywhere. Who is going to participate, and where? What are their demands? Isn't it possible that some people are against the whole thing? We just need to pay the Egyptian blogosphere a quick visit to find out answers for all our questions.

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Tunisia: Social Justice or Social Media?

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jamal Dajani - Jan. 16 (Opinion) - It is very easy, but over-simplistic and naive to decide on a social media interpretation for the Jasmine Revolution, as we have been witnessing by many bloggers and self-appointed Middle East experts, many of whom neither speak Arabic nor have spent an extended period of time in the Middle East.

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What's Happening in Tunisia Explained

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - Reports just emerged around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time that the Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Ben Ali), has fled the country and the Army has taken power.

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Swiss on hand to ease separation of Sudan

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

SwissInfo.ch - By Frederic Burnand, Clare O'Dea - Jan. 08 (Interview) - Switzerland is poised to play a role in the discussions on the secession of Southern Sudan which is expected to be endorsed in Sunday’s independence referendum.

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What Makes Somalis So Different?

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Miller-McCune - By Michael Scott Moore - Dec. 22 () - You’d expect their children would be — on the whole — relieved to live in a stable Western country where even the president is black. But the Somalis who settled in Minneapolis and other selected corners of the U.S. were war refugees, with little money and not many job skills. A recent U.S. census study said Somali immigrants, statistically, were among the “youngest and poorest” newcomers to the U.S., with 82 percent of the community in Minneapolis living below the poverty line.

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Costs of Convenience

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Ashley Judd - Nov. 26 (Opinion) - I dream of the day when Apple and other electronics companies fully commit to tracing, auditing, and certifying the minerals they use in their products, and rape minerals are successfully excluded from the marketplace. We no longer have lead in our paint. Companies report with full transparency contents and manufacturing processes in order to assure public health and gain consumer confidence. This is no different. It is a minimum standard of conduct. I dream of the day when North Americans recoil in horror at the introduction of an otherwise revolutionary and exciting electronic product that lacks TAC....when the queues are expressions of solidarity for 11-year-old mine slaves, women whose vaginas have been perforated by object insertion rape, and families forced to eat one another in each other's presence.

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Anti-Gay Fervor in Uganda Tied to Right-Wing U.S. Evangelicals

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - Oct. 21 () - Human rights activists in Uganda are warning that the lives of gay people are in danger after a newspaper published a front-page story featuring the names and photographs of what it called Uganda's 100 "top" gays and lesbians alongside a yellow banner that read "Hang Them." We look at the ties of the anti-gay movement in Uganda to the far-right evangelical movement here in the United States with Jeff Sharlet, author of _C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy_.

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Exclusive: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, "Our Kind Of Traitor"

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By John le Carré , Amy Goodman - Oct. 11 (Interview) - Exclusive: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, "Our Kind Of Traitor"

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Somalia: The Next Afghanistan?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Kos - Sep. 17 (Opinion) -

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Kenyan Father, White American Mother, from Illinois & Went to Harvard: President Obama? No, It's Guitarist Tom Morello

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Sep. 13 (Interview) - Guitarist Tom Morello, whose great uncle was Kenya’s first prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta, talks about the similarities between his background and President Obama’s. "Other than the fact that we’re devastatingly handsome, half-black dudes with Kenyan fathers, white American mothers, from Illinois, who both went to Harvard, there’s very little in common between us."

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Living with the Enemy

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Guernica - By Susie Linfield - Jul. 03 (Opinion) - “Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations... Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached. This is not just a mistake but a dangerous one; for it is doubtful that any sustainable peace, and any sustainable politics, can be built without a better, which is to say a tragic, understanding of those truths.

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US food aid policies create 561 jobs in Kansas, risk millions of lives around the world

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

aidwatchers.com - By Laura Freschi - Jun. 28 (Opinion) - ... current US food aid policies are NOT an effective or efficient way for the US to achieve what should rightly be the primary objective for food aid. According to the government’s own accountability office, buying food locally in sub-Saharan Africa (which is where the majority of US food aid goes) costs 34 percent less than shipping it from the US, AND gets there on average more than 100 days more quickly, AND is more likely to be the kind of food people are used to eating. I am not arguing that cash aid is ALWAYS better than food aid, only that any reasonable food aid policy would allow aid agencies the flexibility to determine what kind of assistance works best in each situation.

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Alice Walker on "Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel"

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Alice Walker - Apr. 13 (Interview) - As the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners are announced, we speak with the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist Alice Walker. She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was written many books since then. Her latest, just out, is called Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel.

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Technology in the classroom: China's challenges

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:54:06 -0700

GlobalPost - Apr. 13 - Coming in May: Education Heroes Short stories about heroes in education – teachers, administrators, innovators and others who are making a difference in education around the world. Coming in June: Educating Girls in Traditional Societies A look at the

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Jamal Dajani: Call it "Elections in Sudan"

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:14:33 -0700

Huffington Post - Apr. 01 - The Iraqi elections are over but failed to produce a clear winner. While former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi narrowly finished first in the poll, it might take weeks before we find out if he'll be able to build the coalition needed to achieve the magic

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