Servaas van den Bosch
WINDHOEK, May 21 2009 (IPS) – It is a Sunday around five o clock in the afternoon when carpenter Thomas Haimbodi knocks off work. He is waiting for the lorry that will take him and his colleagues from the building site the office building for the new ministry of lands and resettlement in Windhoek to Katutura, the township on the outskirts of the Namibian capital.
Workers at the China Nanjing International building site in Windhoek.…
Katie Mattern
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2009 (IPS) – On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced his intention to sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), in what will be the U.S. s first signing of an international human rights treaty in over a decade.
Obama made the announcement at the 19th anniversary celebration of the passage of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) in Washington. Once he signs the treaty it will then go before the U.S. Senate for ratification so it can become a law.
The treaty is the fourth major international treaty signed by the U.S. and the first in this century. Obama plans to sign when he is at U.N. headquarters in New York next week.
Human rights groups across the U.S. and internationally are prai…
Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 17 2009 (IPS) – Alejandra Gómez is facing prosecution in the southern Mexican state of Puebla for having an abortion. The 20-year-old s case is symptomatic of a wave of anti-abortion legal reforms adopted by a number of states in this country.
The reforms are seen by activists as a backlash against the April 2007 legalisation of first-trimester abortion in Mexico City.
Except in the federal district, abortion is illegal in Mexico, although the 31 states all make exceptions on varying grounds, such as for victims of rape or in cases in which the mother s life or health is at risk or there are serious fetal deformities.
However, even women entitled to legal abortions often find it extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain one…
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 22 2009 (IPS) – Although Brazil has the reputation of being more sexually liberal than its Spanish-speaking neighbours, Brazilians suffer their own fears of stigma when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) the target of a new public health campaign.
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Karla Ronchini comes up against that reality on a daily basis in the Graffe Guinle teaching hospital in Rio de Janeiro, where she treats STDs like syphilis, trichomoniasis, human papillomavirus (HPV), gonorrhea and herpes, and hears explanations like I caught this in a public bathroom or I got this sitting on the bus.
Unfortunately, Brazil is an extremely machista country where people are ashamed of talking about sex, she told IPS. They …
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 2009 – Watching healthcare reform legislation pass through the U.S. Congress is like watching sausage get made. It is a gory and lumbering process of alliances and amendments, procedure and pandering.
The full sausage factory was put on display this year as the Barack Obama administration s top domestic priority, healthcare reform legislation, made its way through the House of Representatives and Senate.
The global fascination with the twists and turns of the legislative process attest to the importance of the issue to the U.S. president and the future of the United States most vulnerable citizens.
The landmark vote in the House over the weekend is the most recent step in the sausage-making process. It has taken 100 years since healthcare reform w…
TOKYO, Dec 2 2009 (IPS) – Sachiko Yamada has been hoping to spend her retirement years traveling and living the good life. Today she devotes her time to taking care of her 90-year- old mother five days a week, leaving her with two days off while her mother goes to a care centre for the elderly.
Kaoru Arai (left), 88, feels lucky that she is still healthy and lives with her son, Kiyoshi (right). …
Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2010 (IPS) – Suicides among United States military veterans ballooned by 26 percent from 2005 to 2007, according to new statistics released by the Veterans Affairs (VA) department.
Of the more than 30,000 suicides in this country each year, fully 20 percent of them are acts by veterans, said VA Secretary Eric Shinseki at a VA-sponsored suicide prevention conference on Monday. That means on average 18 veterans commit suicide each day. Five of those veterans are under our care at VA.
The spike in the suicide rate can most clearly be attributed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the high number of veterans returning to the U.S. with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
We have now nearly two million vets of Iraq an…