ENVIRONMENT-CHAD: Peacekeepers Try To Tread Lightly
By David Axe
IRIBA - Polish army Lieutenant Colonel Marc Gryga didn’t realize he was planning on building his country’s major base here in eastern Chad on top of a cemetery. "It didn’t look like any cemetery you see in the United States or Europe," he says, referring to absence of headstones.
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HEALTH-SOUTH AFRICA: Refugees Denied Access to Health Care
By Kristin Palitza
DURBAN - Refugees and migrants do not have adequate access to health care services in South Africa, aid organisations and NGOs say. This is particularly detrimental for those who are HIV-positive and in need of continuous antiretroviral (ARV) medication: interrupted treatment can mean illness, development of drug-resistance and ultimately death.
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CHINA: ‘Within a Generation Beijing Will Cease to Exist’
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - Few in the Chinese capital are aware of the price their city would pay for staging the world’s first ‘green Olympics’ in August. The fabulous capital of Chinese emperors and the epitome of modern China’s ambitions is being driven to extinction by its chronic lack of water. And the Olympic games are expediting the city’s slow demise, according to experts.
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PARAGUAY: Fourteen Years in the Wilderness
By David Vargas - Special to IPS
POZO COLORADO, Paraguay - Indigenous Enxet people are still waiting for the restitution of their ancestral lands, nearly three years after the Paraguayan state was convicted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of usurping territory and violating basic rights. Meanwhile, they endure overwhelming poverty.
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RIGHTS-KENYA: Doubly Displaced
By Najum Mushtaq
NAIROBI - The Kenyan government says Operation Rudi Nyumbani -- Return Home in Kiswahili -- is almost complete; most of the camps for internally displaced people are closed and the remaining IDPs will be resettled within a week or two. But the hastily implemented programme is being called into question by Kenya's civil society and human rights activists.
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CHINA: Quake Highlights Urban Privilege
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BAILU, Sichuan - 1970 -- The height of the Cultural Revolution. A severe quake ripples through rural China’s Yunnan province in the south. The response from the communist leadership in far away Beijing arrives swiftly -- tens of thousands of little Red Books with quotations from chairman Mao Zedong and as many badges with his image. The rescue efforts are complete with thousands of letters of sympathy from the capital.
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REFUGEES-CHAD: Water and Wood Shortages Worsen
By David Axe
IRIBA - Every morning soon after sunrise, Fatne Abdaraman walks a short distance across the Iridimi refugee camp in eastern Chad hauling a twenty-litre plastic jug. She lines it up along with other women's containers at the water distribution point, then awaits her turn to draw her daily allotment of one of Central Africa's scarcest resources, one that underpins ongoing conflict in the region.
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HEALTH-KENYA: Malaria Rises to Highland Areas
By Najum Mushtaq
NAIROBI - The end of June marks the start of the malaria season in East Africa. After the long rains, conditions in lowland swamps and coastal regions are more conducive for mosquito breeding. But in recent years malaria has also appeared in the highland areas where it was previously unheard of.
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NICARAGUA: Asylum for Refugees - At Last
By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA - Salvadoran refugee Matías Carazo has lived in legal limbo in Nicaragua for more than 26 years. In 1982 he fled from the military in his country who accused him of being a sympathiser of the leftwing guerrillas, and only now is he able to seek protection under a law granting him official refugee status.
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SUDAN: Cracks In North-South Peace Deal
By Skye Wheeler
JUBA - Nyandeng Akot rushed out of the rude shelter of thatch and plastic sheeting pinned against the side of a tree with sticks. Grabbing a passing aid worker's arm, she said she has nothing except the four children that she grabbed when she began running from renewed fighting in Sudan's Abyei area a month ago.
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