Catherine Sasman

WINDHOEK, Mar 20 2006 (IPS) – The sight of an elderly person caring for children with AIDS-related illnesses and grandchildren who may have been orphaned by the pandemic has become a common one in Namibia, and the Southern African region as a whole.
According to the 2004 Common Country Assessment prepared for Namibia under the auspices of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), grandparents provide care for most orphans under the age of 18 who live in rural areas. These children accounted for up to 75 percent of the 156,000 children orphaned at the time of the assessment. (UNDAF enables U.N. agencies to plan development programmes for individual countries; the framework also allows for cooperation between the U.N. system, governments and …

Milagros Salazar* – Tierramérica

LIMA, Aug 10 2007 (IPS) – Far from halting the source that is poisoning the Andean city of La Oroya, which is home to the Doe Run smelting complex, the Peruvian government ordered a contingency plan for the days when air pollution is worst, as if it were dealing with a natural disaster.

The toxic air of La Oroya is a time bomb for the city&#39s children. Credit: Courtesy of Peru…

Kristin Palitza

BAMAKO, Nov 19 2008 (IPS) – Health experts and activists have heavily criticised African governments for failing to collaborate with civil society organisations (CSOs) on health research and health policy development.
Governments tend to perceive CSOs as a threat because they are independent, often critical of government and see their role as holding politicians accountable, health activists said during the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Ministerial Forum for Health Research in Bamako, Mali. As a result, many governments ignore calls for public participation.

Civil societies are a missing voice in health research, said Thelma Narayan, public health consultant at the Centre for Public Health and Equity in India. Without inclusion of CSOs, Afric…

Dahr Jamail

MARFA, Texas, Jan 16 2009 (IPS) – But the [George W.] Bush administration was never seriously interested in helping veterans. The sorry state of care for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans is not an accident. It s on purpose.
Journalist Aaron Glantz makes this stunning statement in his recently released book, The War Comes Home: Washington s Battle Against America s Veterans (UC Press).

And his controversial claim is backed up by an extremely well-researched overview of the dismal state of care provided by the government for this new generation of war veterans.

Glantz, an IPS correspondent who has been covering the U.S. occupation of Iraq for years, including several months of reportage from inside Iraq, provides a devastating overview of the pligh…

Joel Chong

BANGKOK, Jan 25 2010 (IPS) – A staff member would use the cable to beat people. On each whip, the person s skin would come off and stick on the cable, said M noh*, 16, of his detention in Choam Chao Youth Rehabilitation Centre, a government-run facility for drug dependents in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.
If anyone tried to escape, he would be punished some people managed to escape, some didn t. Most who were punished for escaping would be beaten unconscious. Beatings like this happened everyday, he added.

M noh is just one of the 53 Cambodians interviewed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) for its 93-page report Skin on the Cable , launched Monday in this Thai capital.

Between February and July 2009, the HRW documented extensive p…