africa
Elizabeth May: Harper making Canada the North Korea of environmental law
By: Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive: Green Party leader Elizabeth May says Prime Minister Stephen Harper is turning Canada into a “rogue nation” and the “North Korea of environmental…
Loliondo and the Shiek
The A marks Loliondo, a Maasai village in northern Tanzania. I have written about the Maasai before, on this blog in The Wheat Field, and in African publications in the…
Women’s rights, religion and the population crisis
World population has increased from under 1-billion in 1800 to over 7-billion today–that’s just over 200 years. So that’s an extraordinary rate of population increase. If we saw that in…
Doing something about anti-gay lobbying in Africa
If you’ve frequented any LGBT media at all, you’ve heard about Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill (often referred to as the “Kill the Gays Bill”), and possibly other anti-gay legislative bills…
Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Saturday reading. – Hamida Ghafour writes about the effect of tax avoidance by the world’s wealthy on the lives of the rest of the population…
Amnesty International: Sudan releases prisoner of conscience
by Amnesty International | Jan 20, 2013: Sudanese teacher and activist Jalila Khamis Koko, who was arrested by the National Security Service in March 2012, was released from detention after…
Canada-Benin FIPA: Stephen Harper’s new scramble for Africa’s wealth
“A FIPA is a treaty designed to protect and promote Canadian investment abroad through legally binding provisions,” – Prime Minister Stephen Harper With the new Canada-Benin Foreign Investment Promotion and…
World Forest Area Still on the Decline
World Forest Area Still on the Decline (via sustainablog) By Emily E. Adams Forests provide many important goods, such as timber and paper. They also supply essential services—for example, they…
Friday Film Pick: Togetherness Supreme
Barack Obama was still just a U.S. Senator in 2006, but he was already spooling up for his presidential run. Seizing on his rising visibility and popularity, Obama made a…
Is China Grooming Africa for Half a Billion Surplus Chinese?
The theory, published in Asia Times, is that Chinese authorities have figured out their homeland can support a population of 700-million, max. With current numbers at 1.2-billion, China has to…
Mining in the NWT: Who Gets What?
In a recent blog post at Northern Public Affairs, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox looks at the issue of ‘who gets what?’ when a mine is developed in the Northwest Territories (NWT). Here…
Meilinomics II: Income from Within
The following is another excerpt from Dr. Ryan Meili’s new book, A Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health Can Revive Canadian Democracy, which fellow blogger Greg Fingas has been…
Provocation, Appropriation, and That Blackface Clitoridectomy Cake
Here’s an idea for truly provocative art. No more male artists, black or white, speaking for African women. No more ever-more-graphic ever-more-voyeuristic art on the suffering of African women. Stop…
Zimbabwean Senator Suggests “Sex Gadgets” To Curb Homosexuality
A Zimbabwean senator has recommended cutting back on prisoners’ food budget and providing “sex gadgets” instead as a strategy to reduce homosexuality from spreading throughout the country. Speaking before a…
KONY 2012 and the mischievous media habits of slacktivists
Video still from Kony 2012. I was swamped at work last week, when I took a little Twitter break to see what was going on in the world. My feed…
Kony 2012: the photographer who shot the hipsters with a proud colonial mindset
Photograph by Glenna Gordon (detail). By now you’ve heard of the Kony 2012 campaign, and I’ve already expended enough energy discussing it on Facebook to bring anything new and arts-related…
Kony 2012
From Wikipedia: “Joseph Rao Kony (born 1961 in Odek, Uganda) is a Ugandan guerrilla group leader, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group engaged in a violent campaign…
Sedative For The Masses
Lately we have been inundated with news reports about billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet opining on inequity and the need for higher taxes on the rich,with the latest…
Not Out of the Woods
On 21 December 2011, at the opening of the “Dutch Winters” art exhibit at the Rijksmuseum located in Amsterdam’s chic Schiphol Airport, a painting was put on display that, for…