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A Patriot interceptor missile is launched from Omelek Island Oct. 25, 2012 during a U.S. Missile Defense Agency integrated flight test. Credit: U.S. Navy

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 25 2014 (IPS) – The tiny Pacific nation state of Marshall Islands which depends heavily on the United States for its economic survival, uses the U.S. dollar as its currency and predictably votes with Washington on all controversial political issues at the United Nations is challenging the world s nuclear powers before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is being described as a potential battle between a puny David and a mighty Goliath: a c…

A child receives treatment at the Dr. K. Zaman BNSB Eye Hospital in the northeastern district of Mymensingh, Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

MYMENSINGH, Bangladesh, Jun 24 2014 (IPS) – There was a time when four-year-old Taiba, a resident of Makril village in Bangladesh’s central Netrokona district, had little to smile about. The early years of her life were spent trying to cope with bilateral congenital cataracts, referred to in her village simply as ‘child blindness’.

The cloudy film on her natural lens made it difficult to recognise things, and her parents were beginning to despair that she would ever lead a normal life.

Now, sitti…

Fatema,15, sits on the bed at her home in Khulna, Bangladesh, in April 2014. Fatema was saved from being married a few weeks earlier. Local child protection committee members stopped the marriage with the help of law enforcement agencies. Credit: UNICEF

LONDON, Jul 23 2014 (IPS) – Heightening their campaign to eradicate violence against women and girls, United Nations agencies and civil groups have called for increased action to end child marriage and female genital mutilation.

At the first Girl Summit in London Wednesday, hosted by th…

Members of Abu Sheira’s family in front of the tent they set up in the grounds of Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

GAZA CITY, Sep 8 2014 (IPS) – “When the [Israeli] shelling started, I gathered up my family and headed for what I though was a safe place, like a school, but then that became overcrowded and lacked sanitation, so we ended up in the grounds of the hospital.”

Islam Abu Sheira from Beit Hanoun, a city on the north-eastern edge of the Gaza Strip, was speaking to IPS in front of what has been his family’s makeshift ‘home’ at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaz…

Indigenous communities continue to live around the edge of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which was forced to shut down in 1989. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

SYDNEY, Oct 28 2014 (IPS) – The viability of reopening the controversial Panguna copper mine in the remote mountains of Central Bougainville, an autonomous region in the east of Papua New Guinea, has been the focus of discussions led by local political leaders and foreign mining interests over the past four years.

But a report by an Australian non-government organisation warns that the wounds left on local communities by the corporate mining project, “the environmental …

Medialunas with coffee and milk, a classic breakfast in Argentina, in a typical Buenos Aires café. From now on, these small croissants will have to be free of trans fats. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 3 2015 (IPS) – After adopting a new law banning trans fats in industrially processed foods, Argentina is starting out the new year with an improved public health outlook. The challenge now is for the food industry to incorporate the new rules, in an adaptation process that started four years ago.

“This is an important step for making progress in the prevention of cerebrovascular and cardiac diseases because it has been proven that these fats are har…

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…

A man lives in the makeshift house behind him in the Slovak Republic, a member of the EU. Photo: Mano Strauch © The World Bank

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS) – When the World Economic Forum (WEF) met last January in Switzerland, attended mostly by the rich and the super-rich, the London-based charity Oxfam unveiled a report with an alarming statistic: if current trends continue, the world’s richest one percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.

And just 80 of the world’s richest will control as much wealth as 3.5 billion people: half th…

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin is a United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2015 (IPS) – Seventy years ago, with the founding of the United Nations, all nations reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, and in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.

The commit…