WASHINGTON, May 5 2011 (IPS) – The Democratic People s Republic of Korea (DPRK) lived through a famine that killed, at conservative estimates, nearly a million people in the 1990s, and is now nearing the brink of a second food disaster, according to an extensive study conducted this year by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
The Aid Sceptics
Not everyone is prepared to be so forgiving towards what many perceive to be an unyielding government in Pyongyang. In late February this year, the Washington Post reported that 15 years and two billion dollars worth of aid later, one in four pregnant mothers is undernourished, while one in three children is stunted.
Lack of transparency in the food distribution process, and a virtual absence of tangible ‘returns’ on aid, pr…
Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Jun 9 2011 (IPS) – If there s one thing positive that has come out of the violence in this part of Pakistan, it is that people have developed a culture of donating blood that helps save lives, say doctors in the northeastern city of Peshawar.
More now volunteer to donate blood. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.
Getting blood has become amazingly convenient, when it comes to saving the lives of victims of terrorism, says Dr Muhammad Hanif, a medical officer at the Khyber Teaching Hospital in Peshawar, the capital of Khyb…
Poindexter Sama and Jessica McDiarmid
FREETOWN, Jun 20 2011 (IPS) – There is a brief bustle and then a woman wails as the small body is wrapped in cloth and set on a cot by the door of the paediatric ward. Nurses in pristine white uniforms continue to pad quietly around the large room at Ola During Children s Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone s capital city.
Infants are crammed two or three to a bed, sometimes more. Since the introduction nearly 14 months ago of free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five, the number of people coming to seek treatment has shot up. Staffing and equipment has not risen to match, leaving health workers struggling to deal with the influx.
Sierra Leone s ambitious plan to tackle one of the world s highes…
Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 25 2011 (IPS) – We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world, Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel s 24 prisons and detention centres.
Jose Domingo Guariglia interviews MICHAEL RENNER, of Worldwatch Institute
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2011 (IPS) – As the United Nations readies for a major international conference on sustainable development next June in Brazil, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are preparing to play a key role in the run-up to the summit meeting and are preparing a plan of action to be adopted by world leaders.
Michael Renner. Credit: Courtesy of Michael Renner
The Rio+20 conference will take place 20 years after the historic Earth Summit in Brazil in June 1992.
Asked ab…
Sujoy Dhar
BHOPAL, India, Oct 11 2011 (IPS) – Ajay Shrivastav from Bhopal, the central Indian city that witnessed one of the worst industrial disasters of the world in 1984 from a deadly gas leak, is an angry man seeking justice.
A year ago, Ajay learnt that his father Ramadhar Shrivastav, a victim of the toxic gas that had engulfed Bhopal in 1984, has been subjected to clinical trials in a hospital that was meant to treat the gas victims.
We were shocked. We are planning to move legally now against such unauthorised clinical trial, Ajay Shrivastav told IPS.
A Bhopal court last year sentenced eight former top officials of the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp (UCC) to two years imprisonment each for the 1984 gas leak that eventually killed about 20,000 …
Paul Carlucci and Henrietta Abayie
Buruli ulcer is a tropical disease reported in about 30 countries, including Ghana, where doctors are this year predicting about 1,000 cases. Credit: Paul Carlucci/IPS
GREATAER ACCRA WEST DISTRICT, Ghana, Nov 24 2011 (IPS) – For the past 10 years, Buruli ulcer has been eating Benjamin Essel s leg. The skin above his ankle is totally gone, and a swollen, pulpy and reddish wound rises almost up to his knee and wraps around his calf. Even still, this is an improvement over recent yea…
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 24 2012 (IPS) – Thousands of people in the northwest Argentine province of La Rioja are mobilising to stop an open-cast gold mining project in the Nevados de Famatina, a snowy peak that is the semi-arid area s sole source of drinking water.
La Rioja is a dry province and we have just enough clean water to live on, but not to share with miners, one of the protesters, Héctor Artuso, a resident from the small town of Villa Pituil, in the Famatina area, told IPS.
Residents of Famatina and neighbouring Chilecito have set up a partial roadblock at Alto Carrizal, a stop located 4,000 metres above sea level on a gravel road leading up to the highest point of this mountain chain, Cerro General Belgrano (better known as Nevados de Famatina), which stands at 6,250 m…
PESHAWAR, Mar 4 2012 (IPS) – With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.
They operated on me the same day. Now, my eyesight is excellent, says Lakhta, a beneficiary of the Mobile Hospital Programme (MHP) started by the government in 2003 to provide healthcare to people in the war-torn areas of northern Pakistan.
After the United States-led coalition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 its leaders fled across the border to the FATA and adjacent areas, bringing with them their fundamentalist ideology and culture of violence.
Before lon…
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Apr 13 2012 (IPS) – At Fallujah hospital they cannot offer any statistics on children born with birth defects – there are just too many. Parents don’t want to talk. Families bury their newborn babies after they die without telling anyone, says hospital spokesman Nadim al-Hadidi. It’s all too shameful for them.
One among an unusually high number of children in Basra fighting leukaemia. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.
We recorded 672 cases in J…