Julio Godoy
HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, Jun 8 2007 (IPS) – The Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8) agreed to allocate 60 billion dollars in new aid to Africa in the coming years , to beef up the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and to improve primary education across the continent.
G8 working session with Africa representatives. Credit: Federal Government of Germany
But the summit of the heads of government of the G8 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,…
Aaron Glantz
SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 6 2007 (IPS) – Cody Miranda joined the U.S. Marine Corps when he was 17 years old. He loved the military and hoped to spend his entire career in the service.
Miranda has served more than 16 years in the Marine Corps. Over the years, he s been deployed to the Middle East six times, including stints in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But when he returned from a tour in Iraq in 2003, his stepmother Jodie Stewart says, he was a changed man.
He always used to be over focused on time as the military trains you to be, she said as an example. He s never on time for anything anymore. I don t know how to explain it to you. How do you explain it when a man who used to behave one way has gone abstractly and profoun…
Interview with Shirley Yeama Gbujama
FREETOWN, Aug 8 2007 (IPS) – Certain comments resonate long after they are made, and Shirley Yeama Gbujama #39s reported threat to sew up the mouths of those preaching against Bondo is certainly one of them.
Shirley Yeama Gbujama, Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children's Affairs. Credit: Michael J. Carter
The Sierra Leonean social welfare minister is said to have made the comment just ov…
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 4 2007 (IPS) – Sports competitions for the disabled help parents and educators overcome the pitfalls of overprotection. Ten-year-old Andrea began swimming as a toddler, and trains twice a month in the ocean. Her mother says she has never been given special treatment, even though she has been blind from birth.
To attend the Benjamin Constant Institute for the blind in Rio de Janeiro, Andrea has to get up at 4:00 AM every morning, because she lives two hours away by bus, in the outlying neighbourhood of Campo Grande.
Besides her academic subjects, she studies dance and practices sports at school. Her favourite is swimming, which she does twice a week.
My daughter tells me Mama, people have prejudices, they think we #39re s…
Claudia Ciobanu
ROSIA MONTANA, Oct 4 2007 (IPS) – I never had money, I never wanted money, and I never will want money. I fear no one but God. I will not leave this place for as long as I live. Such statements, from a small yet determined core of inhabitants of Rosia Montana are indication that the Canadian corporation that wants to dig for gold here could get blocked by at least some people.
Rosia Montana Credit: Alburnus Maior
Rosia Montana is a commune with a population of 3,500 in the Transylvanian county Alba, roughly 600 km northwest of capital Bucharest. The largest gold de…
David Cronin
BRUSSELS, Oct 30 2007 (IPS) – The struggle to make medicines affordable to the world s poor, especially in Africa, is raging on at the highest levels. Last week the European Commission took a landmark decision on generic drugs and next week a high-level intergovernmental meeting will look at ways to prevent patents from blocking access to drugs.
In an agreement announced last week (on October 23), European Union (EU) governments were told that they are free to make available generic versions of patented drugs for export to poor countries which lack their own manufacturing facilities.
And next week, between November 5 and 10, a little-known group the intergovernmental working group (IGWG) on public health, innovation and intellectual property rights will m…
Steven Lang
JOHANNESBURG, Nov 29 2007 (IPS) – When the number of people reported with diarrhoea began to increase alarmingly in the town of Delmas in Mpumalanga Province towards the end of October, residents had flashbacks to an outbreak of diarrhoea and typhoid that took place in August and September, 2005. They feared the worst as the number of cases grew in the community of about 45,000 people 60 kilometres east of South Africa s financial centre, Johannesburg.
In 2005, five typhoid deaths were confirmed and seventeen people were hospitalised with the disease, normally caused by consuming water contaminated with the faeces or urine of infected people.
This year, soon after health officials became aware of the unusually high incidence of diarrhoea cases in Delmas, t…
Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2008 (IPS) – How many Iraqi civilians have lost their lives as a result of gunshots and bombings since the U.S. military invaded that oil-rich Arab nation nearly five years ago?
The sole of a shoe lies abandoned along the so-called Highway of Death between between Kuwait and Basra. Credit: Christiaan Briggs
Credible estimates for the period March 2003 until June 2006 …
Raphaël Mvogo
KOUSSERI, Northern Cameroon, Feb 19 2008 (IPS) – The situation of thousands of Chadian refugees who have fled to the north Cameroonian town of Kousseri continues to be a source of concern to aid workers, although the picture is not uniformly dismal.
Chadian President Idriss Deby (right), the target of a coup attempt earlier this month. Credit: Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo
There are very few cases of malnutr…
José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 20 2008 (IPS) – Thousands of people who eke out a living by selling recyclable trash scavenged from the municipal dump in the Nicaraguan capital are staging a protest over control of the city s waste, blocking access to the dump by the garbage trucks.
As a result, garbage has been piling up on the streets of Managua for almost three weeks now, putting the city s 1.6 million inhabitants at risk of disease outbreaks.
Some 1,600 waste pickers who comb through the garbage in the huge La Chureca city dump, on the northwest outskirts of Managua, for scrap material to sell began the protest on Mar. 1. They accuse local authorities of encouraging municipal employees to sell recyclable material themselves to formal sector companies that pay taxes…