Raison d’être

In April, we published an article about the new campaign launched by Enough Project: Change the Equation for Congo: Just 5 minutes for 5 days. Many Sama Readerscommented about it and took action by sending an email to their Representative; a few days later, we mentioned the campaign again in: Friday Digest: Congo campaign/Zimbabwe/Sudan/iPad… We support this campaign on the Sama Gazette because we think it’s important we buy conflict-free cell ...

Updated 07/06: Owen Maseko will now re-appear in court on August 16… Updated 05/26: Owen Maseko’s Court hearing has been moved to June 6! In March we reported the arrest of Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko while he was participating in a show at the Bulawayo National Art Gallery, an exhibition about Gukurahundi, the massacres that took place in Matabeleland and the Midlands of Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Maseko spent the weekend in prison and was ...

CIVICUS is an international alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world, and if you didn’t know CIVICUS already but if you follow Max Dana‘s work, you may have already heard about it since the artwork from the  ‘60 Signers for the 60th Anniversary’ Initiative launched by Max in 2008 to support the Every Human Has Rights Campaign (The Elders), was delivered to Ingrid Srinath, Secretary ...

The Hope for Darfur – Justice in Sudan March and Rally, sponsored  by The Darfur Interfaith Network, is scheduled for Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 1:30 pm in Washington. The march will begin at the athletic field on Raoul Wallenberg Place behind the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. About the March (learn more about it): The Hope For Darfur – Justice in Sudan March objective is to encourage people to stand up, take action, and march to ...

Mother’s Day is an annual holiday that recognizes mothers, motherhood and maternal bonds in general, as well the positive contributions that they make to society. In the United States, it is celebrated on the second Sunday in May (May 8 this year) but in Norway it was celebrated in February, in France it will be on May 30, in Indonesia in December… Every country its own date to celebrate Mothers. So we decided to celebrate Mother’s Day ...

Today is World Kids Coloring Day! STAEDTLER and Save the Children are supporting this event in the United States but also in many other countries. On World Kids Coloring Day website, we can read: ‘Coloring plays a large role in the development of children. Here they express that which they cannot put into words. At the same time, coloring fosters creativity and stimulates the imagination. Spontaneously and without hesitation, children reach for ...

May 3 has been officially designated by the United Nations General Assembly as World Press Freedom Day. This day is celebrated across the globe every May 3rd, representing an opportunity to commemorate the fundamental principles of press freedom and to pay solemn tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.  Freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom of the press are essential to democratic participation and for ...

In support of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2010, Dorothy’s Gallery in collaboration with the Embassy of Afghanistan in France presented a remarkable exhibition, ‘Voices on the Rise : Afghan Women Making the News – Des voix qui portent : l’actualité par des femmes afghanes’ in Paris (from March 4 to April 11, 2010). Max Dana visited the exhibition and she was very enthusiastic about it so we decided to mention the ...

On March 4, CARE presented its Half the Sky event in nearly 500 movie theatres across the United States, a one-night event inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof’s and Sheryl WuDunn’s New York Times bestseller, “Half The Sky” which follows the stories of extraordinary women around the world as they struggle to overcome oppression. Kristof and WuDunn focus on three major problems facing women: sex trafficking, maternal ...

In August 2009, one of our first post on the Sama Gazette was: The (new) blood diamonds: it ain’t a movie… This post followed the publication of an article on the Boston Globe: The new blood diamonds by John Prendergast, co-founder of the project Enough at the Center for American Progress. Since then, more and more people are now aware of the situation and we can’t look away anymore. Starting today (April 19 – 23), Raise Hope for Congo ...