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Keywords: East Africa

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate revolutionaries of East Africa

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 11 July 2017
    3 Comments

    The world's poor are bearing the brunt of global warming yet they have done the least to cause it. African countries have some of the lowest carbon emissions rates in the world, but their fields are drying up and their pastureland is vanishing. Still, all is not lost. If we want to find the answers to climate change, many of them exist within the communities already being impacted. These people understand the urgent threat posed by global warming and they are banding together to find solutions.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Je Suis Tehran

    • Justin Glyn
    • 08 June 2017
    1 Comment

    The unprecedented attacks by Daesh in Iran in which at least 12 people were killed and 39 injured come at an incredibly sensitive time for all countries in the Middle East. What is often obscured by commentators is that much of the present violence in the Middle East is political, not religious, even though religious labels are used as a shorthand for the competing blocs (in much the same way as 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' were used during the Troubles in Northern Ireland).

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Egypt and Ethiopia river wars be dammed

    • Tuhimi Akebet
    • 16 May 2017
    2 Comments

    The building of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile by a major Italian construction company remains a source of tension between Ethiopia and Egypt. Egypt sees the Nile as its sole source for the survival of its population and, historically, has seen itself as its sole natural guardian. Ethiopia argued in response, on the basis of unseen studies, that there would be no reduction of water downstream. Both are mindful of the disastrous war they waged against each other early in the 19th century.

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  • RELIGION

    Reconciliation and mission

    • Frank Brennan
    • 15 May 2017

    The reconciliation of this vertical relationship is possible only through the mediation of Jesus who embodies, lives and dies the reality of this reconciliation. He puts us right with our God and thereby establishes the basis for right relationship with each other. In many countries such as Australia, Timor Leste and South Africa, the public rhetoric and programs for reconciliation have, at least in part, been informed and underpinned by this theological perspective.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    No easy judgement in Syrian chemicals attack

    • Justin Glyn
    • 07 April 2017
    13 Comments

    The pictures coming out of Khan Sheikhoun are horrific. Children foaming at the mouth, some with terrible head wounds. No wonder the reaction of the world has been outrage. 'Assad must go' has been revived as a catchphrase in the West. We are right to be appalled. Yet several features about the reported sarin attack in Syria's Idlib Governorate should give pause in the current rush to judgment. Firstly, while you wouldn't know it from much of the media, the facts themselves are contested.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    People's stories animate the landscapes in which we travel

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 29 March 2017
    6 Comments

    In the past two weeks I've met a man who crossed the Andes on foot, horse, bicycle, car and even rollerblades. I've trekked with a mountain guide to a rocky outcrop upon which he was due to marry his fiancé the following weekend, before abseiling down it with her. I've stood in a forest with a woman who came here in the hope of finding the perfect plot of land. Landscapes have a profound effect on the traveller, but it's their inhabitants who evoke for us the soul of a place far more effectively.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Keeping race hate at bay in South Africa

    • Munyaradzi Makoni
    • 28 March 2017
    1 Comment

    Life is back to normal a month after residents of Mamelodi in South Africa marched from on the Home Affairs offices in protest over criminality among immigrants. Now, there are calls for closer re-examination of the action, which many see as threatening peace in one of Africa's biggest economies. 'If drugs and crime were really the issues, it should have been billed as an anti-drugs, anti-crime march, not an anti-foreigner march,' said Johan Viljoen of Jesuit Refugee Service.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    US is no stranger to electoral meddling

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 10 March 2017
    4 Comments

    Each day is met by the same reports: electoral interference has supposedly taken place, instigated by Russian, or at the very least outsourced Russian entities, in the elections of Europe and the United States. Such claims assert, not merely the reality of these claims, but the nature of their influence. Such a stance detracts from one fundamental point: that the manipulation of electoral systems has been, and remains, common fare, irrespective of the finger pointing at Moscow.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Obama built the foundations for Trump's Muslim ban

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 February 2017
    9 Comments

    The right wingers who support stripping people of their visas, and separating families in the process, have a point when they say that the US government is not beginning a new persecution, but merely continuing and deepening the persecutions of their predecessors. While previous administrations were more subtle in their actions than Trump's, it is undoubtedly true that the nationals now picked for sanction were those who were already targeted for visa penalties in the Obama years.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How the working class became white

    • Evan Smith
    • 27 October 2016
    19 Comments

    While the White Australia Policy attempted to prevent non-white workers from living and working in Australia, people from across the globe continued to do both, although often at the margins of white Australian society. The Australian Labor Party and the trade unions were complicit in maintaining this racial divide. In Australia today, a new wave of migrants is working in convenience stores, driving taxis or cleaning buildings. They are part of the Australian working class, but are often not considered such.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Being clear eyed and misty eyed about human rights and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 October 2016
    8 Comments

    Australia's policy is unique and unrepeatable by other nations because it requires that you be an island nation continent without asylum seekers in direct flight from the countries next door and that you have access to a couple of other neighbouring island nations which are so indigent that they will receive cash payments in exchange for warehousing asylum seekers and proven refugees, perhaps indefinitely. The policy over which Turnbull presides is not world best practice. It's a disgrace.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope, not nihilism, is the antidote to bleak times

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 September 2016
    3 Comments

    In Mexico, a 12-year old boy walked onto the road to stare down an 11,000-strong anti-LGBTQ protest. In Italy, a small town has been revived by the arrival of refugees and migrants. In the US, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has pulled the issue of police brutality into apolitical spaces, using symbolic gestures to draw out the history of racialised oppression. As Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine puts it, 'If you want to be right, be a pessimist, if you want to do right, be an optimist.'

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