Ruth Ansah Ayisi

MAPUTO, Mar 30 2007 (IPS) – Six hours of terrifying explosions and projectiles flying everywhere, killing people indiscriminately, are over but the fear and the trauma live on.

Credit: Ruth Ansah Ayisi

A week ago, a depot storing armaments exploded in the middle of 14 densely populated poor neighbourhoods in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. Explosions went on for several hours with bullets and rockets blasting off in all directions.

Currently over 100 people are confirmed dead and about 500 injured, many of them serious and requiring amputations. Nobody escaped the impact. Maputo residents at least …

Milagros Salazar

ALGAMARCA, Peru, May 7 2007 (IPS) – While two companies are disputing a hill rich in gold in the extreme northwest of Peru, more than 3,000 informal sector miners are working there without the most basic safety or environmental protection measures.

Miners on Algamarca hill Credit: Office of the President of Peru.

The hillside is dotted with the blue, yellow and red plastic roofs of the miners tents and shacks. The miners settlement on Algamarca hill is a 15-minute drive from the village of the same name, home to 200 famil…

Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Jul 8 2007 (IPS) – Try as it might Dow Chemical Company is unable to shake off the criminal liability it inherited for the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and also responsibility to clean up toxic contamination at the site of the pesticides plant, originally owned and operated by Union Carbide Corporation.
Since 2001 Dow has fully owned Union Carbide and legally taken over its liabilities, including culpability for the world s worst industrial accident which killed over 3,000 people within the first week and inflicted enormous chemical damage upon more than 200,000 others. The injuries led to a further 15,000 deaths and terrible suffering among the survivors.

To make matters worse for Dow, voluntary agencies working on behalf of the survivors have tu…

A woman watches helplessly as a flood submerges her thatched-roof home containing all her possessions on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar city in India’s eastern state of Odisha in 2008. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

NEW DELHI, Feb 19 2015 (IPS) – So much information about climate change now abounds that it is hard to differentiate fact from fiction. Scientific reports appear alongside conspiracy theories, data is interspersed with drastic predictions about the future, and everywhere one turns, the bad news just seems to be getting worse.

Corporate lobby groups urge governments not to act, while concerned citizens push for immediate action. The little progress tha…

Two Greenpeace technicians take water samples from a river that runs by the Pajaritos Petrochemical Complez in the Mexican city of Coatzacoalcos, where an Apr. 20 explosion in the Planta Clorados III plant left 32 people dead and 136 injured. Credit: Greenpeace Mexico

MEXICO CITY, May 6 2016 (IPS) – A recent explosion at a petrochemical plant in southeast Mexico highlighted the need to strengthen monitoring of hazar…