Moe Yu May
RANGOON, Jun 4 2008 (IPS) – Ko Ko Aung remembers the moment when he thought he had lost his older brother, Wai Yan Soe, to the powerful waters that tore through their house on the night Cyclone Nargis struck, one month ago.
First Wai Yan Soe floated away from where he gripped a pole near our house, and later I [did], the 11-year-old said, in a hesitant voice.
By then, the brothers had given up calling for their parents and two sisters for help. They had seen all four drown when a giant wave struck their home in a village near Labutta, one of the townships that took the worst beating in Burma s Irrawaddy Delta.
Ko Ko Aung clung to a trunk of a palm tree all night to avoid being dragged off by the currents of the widening river. Many things floating …
Interview with Jon Lid n of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis
GENEVA, Jul 3 2008 (IPS) – Japan wants next week s summit of seven major western industrial nations and Russia (G8) to urge the international community to push towards combating HIV/AIDS. It sees this as a critical objective of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that are meant to be achieved by 2015.
Jon Lidén Credit:
Health, water and education will draw the focus of the G8 countries (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Canada and the United States) but the health issue which is considered to be the most off track of t…
Zofeen Ebrahim
MEXICO CITY, Aug 3 2008 (IPS) – The rain gods failed to dampen spirits of activists gathered at the old city centre of Zocalo to protest discrimination against those with the HIV virus. Hundreds of activists dressed in bright tribal costumes, women dressed as skeletons and one gay man wearing tights assembled ahead of the six-day XVII International AIDS conference, Aug. 3 to 8.
The conference at which some 22,000 scientists, policymakers and grassroots workers are expected is also the first such event ever to be held in Latin America and will focus on the region s issues.
While big names like the Mexican President Felipe Calderon, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Margaret Chan, director general of the World Heal…
Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 23 2008 (IPS) – The India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum will hold its third annual summit on Oct. 15 in New Delhi, India, the first such meeting after this trilateral body of countries of the developing South met with a serious setback at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations.
India and Brazil ended up on opposite sides of the disagreement that caused the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations to fail in July, after five years of joint leadership of the Group of 20 (G20), representing the countries of the South at the deliberations.
The G20 had achieved an unprecedented degree of prominence in the mediation and representation of the interests of the developing world.
Safeguards demanded by India and …
Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 14 2008 (IPS) – Is your old TV poisoning a child in China? Or your old computer contaminating a river in Nigeria?
Migrant child from Hunan province sits atop one of countless piles of unrecyclable computer waste imported from around the world. Guiyu, China. Credit: © Basel Actio…
Julia Velasco Parisaca and Wendy Medina
BETANZOS, Bolivia, Jan 9 2009 (IPS) – One of every two children under the age of five in the southwestern Bolivian highlands municipality of Betanzos suffers the effects of chronic malnutrition.
Betanzos, a rural municipality of Quechua Indians located 3,500 metres above sea level in the north of the department of Potosí, has the worst child malnutrition rates in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country.
According to the National Nutrition Survey conducted in 2007 by the Health Ministry, municipalities where 38 of every 100 children are malnourished are classified as having a high degree of food vulnerability. In Betanzos, the rate is 50 out of 100.
Dr. Braulio Escalante, the municipality’s top health authority, tol…
Joyce Mulama
NAIROBI, Feb 21 2009 (IPS) – Six thousand tonnes of mercury enter the environment every year, posing a threat to human and animal health. Environment ministers meeting in Kenya have agreed to negotiate a treaty to reduce the supply and use of mercury worldwide.
The ministers from 140 countries, attending UNEP s Governing Council meeting in Nairobi Feb 16-20, reached consensus to begin negotiating a legally-binding instrument to control mercury pollution next year, leading to a treaty for signature in 2013.
Governments also agreed to increase the budget of UNEP, support renewable energy and energy efficiency, and underlined the importance of investment in a green economy as part of worldwide economic recovery.
Mercury is found in thermometers and h…
Kristin Palitza interviews MOTUMI RALEJOE, parliamentarian and member of Lesotho?s All Basotho Convention (ABC) party
MASERU, Mar 30 2009 (IPS) – The mountain kingdom of Lesotho faces a number of unique hurdles with regard to HIV and AIDS.
Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, Apr 30 2009 (IPS) – Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din is taking the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the Israeli civil administration and a number of Israeli mining companies to court.
The rights group alleges they are illegally stripping Palestinian West Bank quarries of raw construction material for the benefit of the Israeli construction industry and the building of illegal Israeli settlements.
Yesh Din has lodged a petition against the commander of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the Israeli civil administration and the mining companies with the Israeli high court.
The Israeli mining companies involved operate under the jurisdiction of the IDF and the civil administration, which issue the requisite mining permits.
In …
Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 28 2009 (IPS) – For millions of Indian women the colloquial phrase going on the rag can literally mean that, or using just about anything available to stay dry during menstrual periods for lack of access to modern sanitary pads.
Teaching women in Muzaffarpur, Bihar state, to make sanitary napkins Credit: Goonj
At 50 rupees (one US dollar) per pack of five, sanitary napkins are an unaffordable item in the monthly budget of most families in India s impoverished rural areas and urban slum…