Gunmen have taken students hostage and killed at least 14 people at a university in north-eastern Kenya, aid workers and police say.
About 30 others were wounded after attackers stormed a university in Garissa town. Troops have surrounded the campus and are engaging the gunmen.
Witnesses spoke of the masked attackers firing indiscriminately and there are fears the casualty toll could rise. Continue reading Kenya Garissa students ‘taken hostage’ by al-Shabab
When a community issues arrest warrants for more offenses than it has residents, something’s deeply wrong.
Report of Justice Department Investigation of Ferguson Police Department
By Karen Dolan
Here’s something you might not know about Ferguson, Missouri: In this city of 21,000 people, 16,000 have outstanding arrest warrants. In fact, in 2013 alone, authorities issued 9,000 warrants for over 32,000 offenses.
That’s one-and-a-half offenses for every resident of Ferguson in just one year. Most of the warrants are for minor offenses such as traffic or parking violations. And they’re part of a structural pattern of abuse, according to a recent Department of Justice investigation. Continue reading Guilty of Being Poor
As often was the case in colonial times, the corporate agenda in Africa is today often disguised as paternalistic benevolence. Friendly sounding projects such as the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the DfID (Britain’s Department for International Development)-supported New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition promise to eliminate hunger by creating the conditions that will bring new corporate technologies and more big business investment to African agriculture.
This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID hosted a meeting in London with big agribusinesses to discuss strategies to increase corporate control over seeds in Africa. The location of the meeting was secret. So was the agenda. Attendance was strictly invite-only and nobody who even came close to representing African small farmers was invited. Continue reading Corporations vs. communities: a tale of two meetings
