Pambazuka News 486: Remembering Soweto/World Cup 2010

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) youth should celebrate themselves on Youth Day and assert the protections and freedoms enshrined in our constitution, Justice Edwin Cameron said as the country prepares to commemorate the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976.

Discussing poverty with a Washington Post reporter last month, 5th graders at a Southeast Washington school (the poverty rate for Washington, DC is 32 percent) came up with an obvious solution. "Why not just give them money?" (Washington Post, May 11). Experts and policy-makers have found it easy to dismiss this common-sense suggestion, in favor of magical belief in trickle-down economics or of elaborate poverty-reduction plans. But a new book brings together weighty evidence that in fact the...read more

A water-sharing treaty among five upstream Nile Basin countries - to the exclusion of Egypt and Sudan - has reignited the longstanding dispute over water distribution. Local experts, however, say the agreement will not jeopardise Egypt's historical share of Nile water. "Egypt has relied on the waters of the Nile for thousands of years," Hani Raslan, head of the department for Sudan and Nile Basin countries at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, told IPS. "No o...read more

Only two years after its last revision, the Swiss Asylum Act is about to be 'reformed' again. The changes include a gag order on political activism for asylum-seekers and a modification of the concept of a refugee. Ever since Switzerland adopted the Asylum Act in 1981, it has constantly been tightened, largely at the expense of the refugees, as in most European countries.

Dozens of families on the outskirts of Bamako, the capital of Mali, are under threat of being evicted from their lands by the Government in favour of a housing project. The cultivation ban, ordered in July 2009, jeopardizes their right to adequate food. Moreover, if the eviction is realized, it will hinder the ability of the families to feed themselves in the long run. They already belong to the most vulnerable in Mali. The Government acted without prior consultation with the affected individ...read more

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