Julio Godoy
PARIS, Dec 25 2010 (IPS) – Wikileaks cables have revealed a disturbing development in the African uranium mining industry: abysmal safety and security standards in the mines, nuclear research centres, and border customs are enabling international companies to exploit the mines and smuggle dangerous radioactive material across continents.
The Wikileaks cables reveal that U.S. diplomats posted in a number of African countries the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania, Niger, and Burundi, among others have had direct knowledge of the poor safety and security standards in these countries uranium and nuclear facilities.
The cables also highlight the involvement of European, Chinese, Indian, and South Korean companies in the illegal extraction and smuggli…
VIENNA, Feb 10 2011 (IPS) – Pakistan is still reeling from flooding that caused one of the world s costliest natural disasters in 2010, with millions of people lacking shelter, infrastructure in ruins and donations falling short of appeals. But worse may come.
The United Nations disaster coordination agency announced on Jan. 24 that the Pakistan floods caused damages of at least 9.5 billion dollars the world s third costliest natural disaster in 2010 and killed 1,985 people the fourth deadliest in a year of cataclysmic events.
But Pakistanis will face a water challenge of a different sort in the years ahead the possibility of dire scarcity.
There are so many other priorities that the government is facing, particularly at a national security level, and to be frank, …
Claire Ngozo
LILONGWE, Mar 15 2011 (IPS) – When the ban on traditional birth attendants was lifted last year, pregnant women quickly appeared at Dorothy Chirwa s door in Malombe village in Mangochi, a district on the southern shores of Lake Malawi. Chirwa was among the thousands of TBAs banned from providing women with care in 2007.
The Ministry of Health imposed the ban, attributing the country s high maternal mortality rate to a lack of skills on the part of traditional birth attendants. TBAs, the ministry said, were not capable of quickly recognising obstetric emergencies cases and were failing to provide measures to prevent transmission of HIV from mothers to their newborn children.
During the three years that TBAs were banned, cases of life-threatening complicati…
MANAMA, Apr 8 2011 – Salmaniya Medical Complex, once one of the most renowned medical facilities in the Gulf and a jewel in the crown of Bahrain s public healthcare system, has been transformed into a virtual ghost town.
Its gates and front entrance are barricaded with checkpoints and masked military officers, armed with rifles. Its emergency room, once the busiest in the country, is empty.
And, according to eyewitness reports collected by Human Rights Watch, hospital staff say security and military forces have sought out and threatened, beaten and detained patients with protest-related injuries.
These patients are then systematically segregated from the rest of the patient population and transferred to the sixth floor, where they are virtually inaccessible to anyon…
Ulrich Vital Ahotondji
COTONOU, May 11 2011 (IPS) – Training of midwives in the active management of the third stage of labour targets one of the most common causes of maternal deaths: bleeding after delivery.
In Benin, the maternal mortality ratio is 397 deaths for every 100,000 live births, and bleeding after delivery alone is responsible for 25 percent of these deaths, says Dr René Daraté, director of maternal and child health at the Ministry of Health.
The government of Benin has therefore found it necessary to introduce, among other things, the Canadian technique of active management of the third stage of labour (AMTSL) to save women from post-partum haemmorhage, Daraté said.
According to Daraté, himself an obsterician and gynaecologist, AMTSL is an…
Mehru Jaffer
VIENNA, Jun 13 2011 (IPS) – When Farah s 16-year-old son began to disappear for several nights a week without saying where he went, she was naturally worried. After he returned one day and shattered the television screen in their Peshawar home, the mother of three decided it was time to quit her job as a teacher and to find out what was making her youngest child so angry.
To her horror, the schoolteacher who requested that her real name not be published discovered that her son was spending time in the company of people belonging to terrorist groups in Pakistan s Swat Valley where Farah s family originally comes from. The boy s newly found friends were teaching him that it is a sin for his mother to leave home to work everyday and for his sister, a medical student…
Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2011 (IPS) – Some 13 million people across Europe, Russia, and other parts of the world remain largely dependent on Afghanistan s poppy production to fuel their addiction to heroin, according to a new U.N. report on global use of illicit drugs.
Yes, Afghanistan is on top of the list, Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told IPS.
Last year, more than 210 million people around the world used illegal substances such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, as well as prescription opioid drugs and new synthetic drugs, said. But while global markets for cocaine, heroin and cannabis declined or remained stable, the production and abuse of prescription drugs rose.
The gains we have witnessed i…
Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 27 2011 (IPS) – Two years into his term, El Salvador s first-ever leftwing president, Mauricio Funes, finds himself more and more distanced from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that brought him to power and from the promises of change that got him elected, analysts say.
Some of the moves made by Funes have not been the ones expected by the voters who put him in office with 51 percent of the vote in the March 2009 elections.
He has not lived up to expectations, and I perceive a gradual disillusionment which, like a cup, is filling up drop by drop, Omar Serrano, a vice rector at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University, told IPS.
Funes, a former CNN journalist and popular TV host, did not even joi…
MOGADISHU, Sep 5 2011 (IPS) – Masses of food meant for famine victims in Somalia are being stolen, an investigation has revealed.
Mothers and their babies queue for food aid at the Raghe Ugas School in Waberi, Mogadishu. Credit: Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar
There is widespread food aid corruption, that is why I am calling for the establishment of a special food aid monitoring group — this must include Somalis and the forei…
Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Oct 18 2011 (IPS) – Eric Saúl Majano stares blankly up at the ceiling in the government office in the Salvadoran capital that he is visiting to seek a disability pension, since he has been unable to work since 2002 due to schizophrenia. But achieving his goal will not be easy.
I see and hear things that aren t real; that s why I can t work, Majano, 37, explains to IPS after leaving the doctor s office where he was examined.
Since El Salvador s social security system was privatised in 1998, 35 percent of the 18,000 workers who have applied to the government commission that evaluates eligibility for a disability pension, the CCI, have been turned down after medical exams on the grounds that their degree of disability does not warrant a pens…