Grace Mugabe’s PhD, awarded just months after she enrolled for the course, has incited protest among Zimbabwean students who view it as a ‘sham’. (Aaron Ufumeli)
The Zimbabwe students union, on Friday, demanded the resignation of authorities at the country’s top university after it awarded a “miraculous” doctorate to President Robert Mugabe’s wife.
French economist Thomas Piketty sees the source of the 2008 financial crash in the unsustainable levels of inequality that characterizes capitalism.
Kevin Davie
Marikana demonstrated the age-old debate over how much of output should go towards wages, and how much to profit. (Delwyn Verasamy, Mail & Guardian)
Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century has become one of the most talked-about – if not read – economic books of our times, opens his 685-page tome in the North West province of South Africa on August 16, 2012.
“The South African Police intervened in a labor conflict between workers at the Marikana platinum mine near Johannesburg and the mine’s owners: the stockholders of Lonmin Inc based in London. Police fired on the strikers with live ammunition. Thirty-four miners were killed. Continue reading Wealth division in SA and around the world→
“We have to go out! So that the church seems like a field hospital,” where the first order of the day “is heal the wounds, not measure people’s cholesterol. That comes later. Got it?”
By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — With so much spiritual, social and moral suffering in the world, the church has “no right” to stay locked up in an ivory tower, engaging in “byzantine” philosophical reflection, Pope Francis told members of the Focolare movement.
The Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Boutros Marayati, says the air raids against jihadi bases in Syria, carried out by the United States with the support of some Arab countries, are not being welcomed by the local population. They don’t see the bomber as liberators People are afraid “that this type of external involvement could worsen the situation” he said. Continue reading Syria: Bishop says US air raids ‘could worsen the situation’→
WASHINGTON (CNS) — Expanded airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria serve as little more than a recruiting tool for the extremist group and place more innocent people in danger, the leadership of Pax Christi International said.
A central cause of the recent dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied children immigrating into the U.S. through its border with Mexico is the high level of crime and violence in the principal “sending countries” – Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador (collectively referred to as the Northern Triangle) and Mexico (see related article here). Yet neighboring Nicaragua, with the lowest per capita GDP in the region, has been able to maintain markedly lower levels of violence. While the specific history of Nicaragua has much to do with the lack of violence, its police system, dubbed “a new security paradigm” by some, could offer ways forward for its more violent neighbors. Continue reading Where are Nicaraguan children?→
Abubakar Shekau in a low quality video admitted to kidnapping nearly 300 girls in Nigeria and threatened to sell them (Screengrab).
Maiduguri, Nigeria, September 18, 2014 / 12:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme of Maiduguri has denounced the militant Islamist group Boko Haram for the murders of more than 2,500 faithful in his Nigerian diocese.
With the Islamic State’s rise, Libya’s slide back into civil war, and the conflict brewing between Ukraine and Russia, there’s plenty to fear these days.
In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the paradox of water abundance and scarcity is felt by this city of 10 million inhabitants along the Congo River.
I was visiting a young friend whose leg was amputated after a serious accident. While I was trying to comfort him, her mother told me that they were more worried about water than anything else: for four days, they have had no water. I was shocked. How was it possible that in a university clinic of a large capital city of a great country in the heart of Africa there is no drinking water, no water at all? Continue reading Paradox of abundance and scarcity of water in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo→
Graça Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela, speaks at the UN climate summit in New York. Graça Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela, speaks at the UN climate summit in New York. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
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