South Sudan

Presidents and prime ministers of the entire African continent are in attendance at the two-day forum
Chinese President Xi Jinping told dignitaries at the opening session of the Third Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) that he believed working together, the two regions could achieve a win-win scenario for all.
“No one could undermine the great unity between the Chinese people and the African people. No one could hold back the Chinese people or the African people as we march toward rejuvenation,” he said.

Always trust the handy anecdote to overwhelm reality with force and false persuasiveness.  The taxi driver irate at the latest opportunistic scribble in a Rupert Murdoch rag is bound to regale you with a story as you speed to the airport: “Those bloody gangs.  And the police didn’t even bloody mention they were African!”  A vital canon of reactionary politics is extolling the supposed reality of a phenomenon that does not affect you.  All that matters is its existence, however modest its effect.

Co-Written By Ashish Kumar Singh & Judas Everett South Sudan is a typical example of modern day media saturation, there are only so many cries for UN intervention, only so many pleas for aid and only so much bad news people can absorb before saturation is achieved. Since independence and the follow South Sudanese civil war and various famines there[Read More...]

Earlier this year, the Sisters of St. Brigid invited me to speak at their Feile Bride celebration in Kildare, Ireland. The theme of the gathering was: “Allow the Voice of the Suffering to Speak.”

P.D. Lawton
21st Century Wire
A number of major geopolitical moves are currently afoot in Africa. Make no mistake about it: neocolonialism is alive and well on the continent.

Most of us living in the West have never known hunger. In America, food shelves are easily accessed by the most vulnerable of society.
Despite living in a time where there is a global surplus of food, millions of people around the world are still suffering from famine. If you follow mainstream media coverage about these humanitarian disasters, they’re most likely presented through the lens of climate change, high food prices and taxes.

I come and stand at every door
But none shall hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
— Nazim Hikmet, I Come and Stand at Every Door

“Near-famine, which is affecting 20 million people in Africa and the Middle East, is likely the least reported but most important major issue of our time.”

A South Sudanese refugee sits on a mat outside a communal tent with his brother at the Imvepi reception center, where newly arrived refugees are processed in northern Uganda Friday, June 9, 2017. (AP/Ben Curtis)
“[Famine] seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature…the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to provide subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
– Thomas Malthus, “Essay on Population”

(MPN) The annual Global Peace Index, recently released for June 2017, has found that while the world is more peaceful now than last year, violence has increased significantly overall in the past decade.
Although the situation has improved in many countries, the ten lowest-ranking nations – known as the world’s “least peaceful” countries – have shown little change in recent years.