Cancer drugs are unaffordable in the developing world
▻https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/06/cancer-drug-prices-developing-world
Goldstein and his colleagues from four countries calculated the prices of a month’s supply of 23 #cancer drugs in Australia, China, India, Israel, South Africa, Great Britain, and the United States.
(...) “affordability” is calculated as a percentage of per capita gross domestic product required to pay for a month’s supply of the median-priced drug, the study found.
UN ‘buries’ resolution on Gaza’s environmental health crisis under US, Israeli pressure
▻http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/un-buries-resolution-gaza-s-environmental-health-crisis-under-us-isra
The final round of government meetings at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in the last week of May resulted in the passing of 25 resolutions, including a landmark resolution calling for states to implement all international law on protecting the environment during war in national legislation.
However, the draft resolution on #Gaza calling for a UN field assessment of environmental damage caused by war 2012 and 2014 was aborted amidst a storm of controversy.
The resolution had originally been tabled by Morocco with the backing of the Arab League, Lebanon, Oman, Egypt, Algeria, South Africa, Djibouti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
Sources at the meeting said that heated debate over the resolution was followed by a technical sleight-of-hand that allowed delegates to claim a vote on the Gaza resolution was impossible.
The original resolution proposed by Morocco was opposed by three member states, the US, #Canada and #Israel, while the European Union suggested deleting substantive portions of the text.
#Etats-Unis #UE #ONU
South Africa’s parliament approves land expropriation bill | Top News | Reuters
▻http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKCN0YH20L?sp=true
South Africa’s parliament on Thursday approved a bill allowing state expropriations of land to redress racial disparities in land ownership, an emotive issue two decades after the end of apartheid.
Most of South Africa’s land remains in white hands and many commercial and small-scale farmers are currently facing tough times because of the worst drought in at least a century.
...
Around 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of land have been transferred to black owners since apartheid, equal to 8 to 10 percent of the land in white hands in 1994. The total is only a third of the 30 percent targeted by the ANC.
South African Nobelist Coetzee on Israel and apartheid: ‘Draw your own conclusions’
Allison Deger on May 28, 2016
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2016/05/nobelist-apartheid-conclusions
J.M, Coetzee’s full introduction:
I came to Palestine to see and listen and learn and over the course of the past week I have seen and heard and learned a great deal. I come away with an enduring impression of the courage and the resilience of the Palestinian people at this difficult time in their history. Also of the grace and humor with which they respond to the frustration and the humiliations of the occupation.
I was born and brought up in South Africa and so naturally people ask me what I see of South Africa in the present situation in Palestine. Using the word apartheid to describe the way things are here, I’ve never found to be a productive step. Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey in the 1920s, using the word apartheid diverts one into the inflamed semantic wrangle, with which cuts short the opportunities of analysis. Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive, self defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest particular to cement its hold on the land and natural resources. In Jerusalem and in the West Bank—to speak only of Jerusalem and the West Bank—we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity, put in place by an exclusive self-defined group to consolidate the colonial conquest, in particular to maintain and indeed extend its hold on the land and its natural resources. Draw your own conclusions.
Across Africa, the worst famine since 1985 looms for 50 million | Global development | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/may/22/africa-worst-famine-since-1985-looms-for-50-million?CMP=twt_gu
Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Madagascar, Angola and Swaziland have already declared national emergencies or disasters, as have seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. Other countries, including Botswana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have also been badly hit. President Robert Mugabe has appealed for $1.5bn to buy food for Zimbabwe and Malawi is expected to declare that more than 8 million people, or half the country, will need food aid by November.
More than 31 million people in the region are said by the UN to need food now, but this number is expected to rise to at least 49 million across almost all of southern Africa by Christmas. With 12 million more hungry people in Ethiopia, 7 million in Yemen, 6 million in Southern Sudan and more in the Central African Republic and Chad, a continent-scale food crisis is unfolding.
#climat #famine #Afrique #El_Nino #sécheresse
Student protests and postapartheid #South_Africa’s negative moment
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/05/student-protests-and-postapartheid-south-africas-negative-moment
The political theorist #Achille_Mbembe, from the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, describes South Africa as experiencing a “negative moment.” Though protest and dissatisfaction with the terms of the “new” South Africa have been brewing for some time, there is a strong sense that the black majority is losing patience with the ruling African […]
South African court allows landmark silicosis suit against gold firms | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/13/south-african-court-allows-landmark-silicosis-suit-against-gold-firms?C
South Africa’s High Court gave the green light on Friday for class action suits seeking damages from gold firms on behalf of up to half a million miners who contracted fatal lung diseases while working underground.
The decision by Judge Phineas Mojapelo sets the stage for protracted proceedings in South Africa’s largest class action suit, which analysts have said could cost the gold industry hundreds of millions of dollars.
Western Officials Walk Out of Ugandan President’s Inauguration | TIME
▻http://time.com/4328968/uganda-president-inauguration-yoweri-museveni-international-criminal-court
Several Western officials walked out of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s swearing-in ceremony Thursday, after he mocked the International Criminal Court (ICC) in his inaugural speech.
Museveni called the court “a bunch of useless people” during his welcoming remarks as he was sworn in for a fifth term, extending his rule to 35 years, Reuters reports.
Among those in attendance was Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is wanted by the ICC on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur between 2003 and 2008. Al-Bashir denies the court’s authority and has flouted arrest warrants in the past when he traveled to South Africa last year.
“In response to President Bashir’s presence and President Museveni’s remarks,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau said at a Thursday press briefing, “the U.S. delegation, along with representatives of the E.U. countries and Canada, departed the inauguration ceremonies to demonstrate our objection.”
#MH370: Two aircraft pieces found in South Africa and Rodrigues Island are ‘almost certainly’ from lost plane | National Post
▻http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/malaysia-flight-370-two-aircraft-pieces-found-in-south-africa-and
Malaysia’s government said Thursday that two more pieces of debris, discovered in South Africa and Rodrigues Island off Mauritius, are “almost certainly” from Flight 370, bringing the total number of pieces believed to have come from the missing Malaysian jet to five.
[…]
Though the discovery of the debris has bolstered authorities’ assertion that the plane went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean, none of the parts thus far has yielded any clues into exactly where and why the aircraft crashed. Those elusive answers lie with the flight data recorders, or black boxes, which may never be found, said Geoff Dell, a specialist in accident investigation at Central Queensland University in Australia.
“It shows they’re looking in the right ocean — that’s about it,” Dell said.
The two newly identified pieces of debris were found in March. Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said one is an engine cowling piece with a partial Rolls-Royce logo, and the other is an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin — the first interior part found from the missing plane.
Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms « Wits University Press
▻http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/zimbabwes-migrants-and-south-africas-border-farms
During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheidera border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Focusing on one farm, this book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis. A close ethnographic study, it addresses the complex, shifting labour and life conditions in northern South Africa’s agricultural borderlands. Underlying these challenges are the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis of the 2000s and the intensifi ed pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalization and post-apartheid land reform. But, amidst uncertainty, farmers and farm workers strive for stability. The farms on South Africa’s margins are centers of gravity, islands of residential labour in a sea of informal arrangements.
In precise, limpid prose, Maxim Bolt brings to life the human ecology of a border farm. Ever alert to the counterintuitive, he shows how stability is fashioned in the midst of the unstable, and how work organises life in a time of mass unemployment. The monograph sheds light on new and important social processes. It is a significant achievement.
— Jonny Steinberg, Author of A Man of Good Hope
Ethnographies of labour and social life on large-scale farming enterprises anywhere in the world, and certainly on the African continent (including South Africa), are remarkably few and far between. Bolt’s study will stand out immediately and very prominently in the anthropology of large-scale farms and plantations regionally and globally.
— Eric Worby, University of the Witwatersrand
A thoughtfully structured and beautifully written book which … deserves to be widely read and appreciated. The book is at a unique intersection of a number of scholarly fi elds, namely labour studies, agrarian studies, border studies, and displacement and migration studies besides the broader discipline of economic anthropology.
— Amanda Hammar, University of Copenhagen
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed - The Ethnography Award Shortlist 2016
►http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3F83qt0JpVqX31TvBvyPt4f/the-ethnography-award-shortlist-2016
Des projets super inbéressants, dont j’ai prisconnaissance via la liste « Wiser »
Thinking Allowed in association with the British Sociological Association announces the annual award for a study that has made a significant contribution to ethnography: the in-depth analysis of the everyday life of a culture or sub-culture. The award has been running since 2014, and is decided by a panel of five academic judges. Last year’s winner was Ruben Andersson, with the publication, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. The winner of this year’s award will be announced on 13 April.
From child poverty to prison gangs, here’s the short list for Thinking Allowed’s third Ethnography Award.
–—
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed - The Ethnography Award Shortlist 2016
►http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3F83qt0JpVqX31TvBvyPt4f/the-ethnography-award-shortlist-2016
1. You don’t find all homeless people on the street.
Emma Jackson discovered that contemporary, urban homelessness is a far cry from the rough sleeping, ‘cardboard city’ stereotype. From sofa surfers to hostel dwellers, she uncovered lives of rootless mobility.
‘Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility’ by Emma Jackson
–—
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed - The Ethnography Award Shortlist 2016
►http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3F83qt0JpVqX31TvBvyPt4f/the-ethnography-award-shortlist-2016
5. Uncertainty in a post-apartheid South Africa.
During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheid-era border fence, searching for work as farm labourers. Maxim Bolt explores an overlooked story of migration at the intersection of the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa.
#afrique_du_sud #zimbabwe #migrations #migrations_pendulaires #frontières #murs
Environmental risk: Urban refugees’ struggles to build livelihoods in South Africa
▻https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301483064_Environmental_risk_Urban_refugees_struggles_to_build_livelih
#asile #migrations #réfugiés #Afrique_du_Sud #urban_refugees
Australia may take in African rhinos to prevent extinction | Reuters
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-rhino-idUSKCN0XJ1SY?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
▻http://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160422&t=2&i=1134081106&w=&fh=545px&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=LYN
Wildlife groups plan to relocate 80 rhinoceros from South Africa to Australia in a bid to prevent them being hunted to extinction, one of the project’s leaders said on Friday.
Poaching is on the rise in Africa, driven by demand from China and Vietnam where rhino horn, used in traditional medicine, can sell for around $65,000 per kilogram, according to estimates by conservationists.
Around 1,300 rhino were killed illegally in Africa last year.
The Australian Rhino Project and South Africa’s Elephants, Rhinos and People (ERP) plan to begin relocating the animals this year to establish an “insurance population”.
If the project is successful, more rhinos could be flown to other “safe havens” in Texas and Florida.
“Poachers will go where it is easy to poach. It is easier to poach rhinos in Africa than in Australia or America,” ERP Director Wouter van Hoven told Reuters.
“It’s not that we want to get the rhinos out of Africa but we need to put some rhinos into a safe deposit box.”
In Defence of Life (2016)
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/in-defence-of-life-2016
In Defence of Life follows the struggles and triumphs of four communities resisting large-scale mining projects in Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa and Romania. Courageous environmental and...
The Radical Historian
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/04/the-radical-historian
Until the 1970s, South African historiography – on elite, white English-speaking campuses – was dominated by historians. These historians traced South Africa’s #History of racism to the frontier settled by Dutch descendants, refusing any links to British imperialism, even as they had begun to integrate Africans into their histories. A group of mostly young, white […]
#panamaleaks Secrets and victims
Très concrets exemple des implications du #offshoring
Nick Kgopa’s father died when Nick was 14. His father’s workmates at a gold mine in northern South Africa said Nick’s dad had been killed by chemical exposure.
Nick and his mother and his younger brother, who is deaf, survived thanks to monthly checks from a fund for widows and orphans of mineworkers.
One day the payments stopped.
His family was one of many that lost out because of a $60 million investment fraud pulled off by South African businessmen. Prosecutors alleged that a group of individuals connected to an asset management company, Fidentia, had schemed to loot millions from investment funds — including the mineworkers’ death benefits pool that was supporting some 46,000 widows and orphans.
Mossack Fonseca’s leaked documents show that at least two of the men involved in the fraud used the Panama-based law firm to create offshore companies — and that Mossack Fonseca was willing to help one of the fraudsters protect his money even after authorities publicly linked him to the scandal.
►http://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=44&v=F6XnH_OnpO0
Decolonizing the teaching of #economics in #South_Africa
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/04/its-the-economy-no-7
Recently Ihsaan Bassier, a graduate student in economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, wrote a thought provoking essay for GroundUp, a local news website, on the need to “decolonize” the teaching of undergraduate economics at that university. Economics in South African #universities is currently taught in the manner and methods […]
Living Color. The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color - Nina G. Jablonski - Paperback - University of California Press
▻http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520283862
Living Color is the first book to investigate the social history of skin color from prehistory to the present, showing how our body’s most visible feature influences our social interactions in profound and complex ways. Nina Jablonski begins this fascinating and wide-ranging work with an explanation of the biology and evolution of skin pigmentation, tracing how skin color changed as humans moved around the globe, exploring the relationship between melanin and sunlight, and examining the consequences of mismatches between our skin color and our environment due to rapid migrations, vacations, and other life-style choices.
Aided by plentiful illustrations, this book also explains why skin color has become a biological trait with great social meaning—a product of evolution perceived differently by different cultures. It considers how we form impressions of others, how we create and use stereotypes, and how prejudices about dark skin developed and have played out through history—including as justification for the transatlantic slave trade. Offering examples of how attitudes toward skin color differ in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa, Jablonski suggests that a knowledge of the evolution and social importance of skin color can help eliminate color-based discrimination and racism.
Il est sorti en 2014 et ça a l’air super intéressant, quelqu’un l’a lu?
Non living colour ça s’écoute :/ c’est plus rapide
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0
Justine Musk Interview on Divorce from PayPal Founder Elon Musk
▻http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/advice/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife
As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, “I am the #alpha in this relationship.” (...) He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon’s judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. “I am your wife,” I told him repeatedly, “not your employee.”
“If you were my employee,” he said just as often, “I would fire you.”
(...) Elon was obsessed with his work: When he was home, his mind was elsewhere. I longed for deep and heartfelt conversations, for intimacy and empathy. And while I sacrificed a normal family life for his career, Elon started to say that I "read too much," shrugging off my book deadlines. This felt like a dismissal
(...) I had turned into a trophy wife — and I sucked at it. I wasn’t detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn’t interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections. And no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. “Go platinum,” he kept saying, and I kept refusing. (...) In the months after our separation, I dyed my hair dark and cut it.
Critics of Israel Boycott Warn of Harm to U.S. Corporate Interests
▻https://theintercept.com/2016/03/18/critics-of-israel-boycott-warn-of-harm-to-u-s-corporate-interests
The effort to shield Israel from boycotts by citing not just the security relationship, but also the economic relationship, is similar to arguments made during the 1980s campaign for divestment in the apartheid regime of South Africa. In a 1981 interview with CBS’s Walter Cronkite, President Reagan explained that part of his opposition to tougher sanctions on South Africa was because it “strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals.”
Over 30 years later, these same arguments are being repeated.
“I think for a lot of different reasons that have been discussed, you know, human rights issues do come up in lots of different markets,” Kram said, in response to a question from The Intercept. “And frankly those are issues for political leaders to hammer out, in a foreign policy approach.”
“Do Palestinian human rights issues ever come up in how you determine whether to get involved in this?” The Intercept asked.
“No,” Kram concluded.
#BDS
The strongest victims in the world, by Sisonke Msimang | Daily Maverick
▻http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2016-02-25-the-strongest-victims-in-the-world
[In South Africa] The failure to prioritise justice has left poor black people trapped in a cycle of poverty at the very same time that it has given white South Africans the freedom to reinvent themselves.(...)
Black violence must be dealt with through increased security, while white violence must be met with love and intense introspection. The #Colourblind movement that has popped up illustrates this particularly well.
Those who call for prayer and reflection are driven by the idea that whites can be coaxed out of violence through a change of heart, while blacks must be punished and controlled when they are violent. This asymmetric analysis is at the core of racist belief and ideology
Book: ‘South Africa’s Agrarian Question’ by Ward Anseeuw - Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation
▻http://governanceinnovation.org/south-africas-agrarian-question
South Africa’s Agrarian Question, by Hubert Cochet, Ward Anseeuw and Sandrine Fréguin-Gresh, to be published by HSRC Press this month:
Based on an in-depth analysis of several contrasting agricultural regions, this book aims to assess South Africa’s ongoing agrarian reform and the country’s agrarian dynamics.
The conclusion is without doubt: 20 years after the first democratic elections, the country’s land pattern remains almost unchanged, and primary agriculture and its broader value-chains are more concentrated than ever. Without fundamentally questioning the highly specialised, fossil energy and synthetic input dependent, oligopolistic entrepreneurial agricultural production model, which is presently structuring the sector and is guiding the reforms, a more equitable redistribution of resources and value-addition will by no means be possible.
The answers provided in this book will be of interest not only to all those interested in the South African experiment, but also to those who, in all regions, are questioning the mainstream agrifood regime and asking how it can be transformed – Olivier De Schutter
This book examines and contributes to the structural questions that underpin the current stagnation of South Africa’s agrarian reform. Presenting fresh approaches in analysing agrarian issues and tools to assess farming systems and agricultural development, this incisive study will be an important resource to policy makers, academics and those with an interest in agrarian reform.
#Afrique_du_sud #foncier #terres #agriculture et #livre
Jas Boude - Skating South Africa’s Mean Streets
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/jas-boude-skating-south-africas-mean-streets
"To push through the streets is the ultimate freedom. But what happens when the streets do not welcome you? Or get you killed? Scorning their government-built joke of a skate park which is too...
’Racist’ Australia compared to Apartheid South Africa by UN Human Rights commissioner | Daily Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390748/Racist-Australia-compared-Apartheid-South-Africa-UN-Human-Rights-commis
The United Nations’ top human rights watchdog has attacked Australia’s tough refugee policies and the treatment of outback Aborigines, saying there was a strong undercurrent of racism in the country.
According to UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, long-standing policies of locking up asylum seekers had ’cast a shadow over Australia’s human rights record’, and appeared to be completely arbitrary.
’I come from South Africa and lived under this, and am every way attuned to seeing racial discrimination,’ she said.
Rearranging the furniture at Stellenbosch
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/02/rearranging-the-furniture-at-stellenbosch
Stellenbosch has been a crucial part of the decolonization drama that swept South Africa in 2015. The past year has highlighted how this town in the Western Cape struggles with the contradictions of its selective historical amnesia. Stellenbosch persists in allegorizing itself as a banal blend of pastoral and techno-futuristic progress, at the heart of […]