Dahr Jamail
BEIRUT, May 2 2007 (IPS) – The influx of refugees from Palestinian areas and the inability of the government to do much for them has strengthened a unique NGO providing essential services.
The influx of refugees from Palestinian areas and the inability of the government to do much for them has strengthened a unique NGO providing essential services.
The Popular Aid for Relief and Development (PARD), which began working in the early 1980s before registering as an official NGO with the Lebanese government in 1990, has taken it upon itself to provide environmental services, health education, medical services and community development centres for refugees.
We give services because services are better than money, Ahmad Halimeh, co-founder of PARD told I…
Peter Hirschberg
JERUSALEM, Jul 9 2008 (IPS) – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has laid it out in the starkest possible terms for his fellow Israelis. If they do not relinquish control of the occupied territories, he has warned them, Israel will ultimately cease to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
If Israel does not extract itself from the West Bank and a Palestinian state is not established alongside the Jewish state, he said in an interview late last year, Israel will find itself trapped in an apartheid-like reality. The day will come when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, he said. As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.
Olmert s conviction is driven by what many Israelis…
SRINAGAR, Feb 7 2012 (IPS) – Maheen was nine years old when she witnessed the death of her elder brother. At the age of 10 she saw the dead body of her neighbour, killed in the crossfire between Kashmiri rebels and Indian security forces, his guts spilled out on the road.
The unprecedented growth of psychiatric disorders in Kashmir has left many patients completely isolated. Credit: Sana Altaf/IPS
The incidents left Mahee…
Patients attending Opiate Substitution Therapy at a clinic in the eastern Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk. Credit: International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine.
KIEV, Sep 3 2012 (IPS) – Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS – one of the eight Millennium Development Goals – the region has the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic.
Punitive drug policies, discrimination and problems with access to medicines and important therapy are all driving an epidemic which is unlikely to be contained, world experts say, until governments in countries with the worst problems change key policies and approaches to the…
Credit: Twitter/@AntDeRosa
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 2014 (IPS) – Despite media hype, missteps by federal health agencies, and apparent efforts by right-wing and some neo-conservatives to foment fear about the possible spread of the Ebola virus in the U.S., most of the public remain at least “fairly” confident in the authorities’ ability to deal with the virus.
Concern about the potential threat posed by the virus has clearly grown over the past two weeks, especially after two nurses at a Dallas hospital who helped treat a fatally infected Liberian man contracted the virus. But a major poll released Tuesday found that a clear majority of respondents expressed litt…
Divya Srinivasan is South Asia Consultant for international women’s rights organisation
At Narok County, Kenya, during a discussion by anti-FGM campaigner Agnes Pareyio from Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative (TNI). The picture was taken at a school run by TNI for girls escaping FGM and child marriage. Credit: Equality Now/ Tara Carey
NEW DELHI, Feb 6 2019 (IPS) – According to official data on the global prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) released by UNICEF there are in the world who have been cut. Shocking though this statistic is, it seriously underestimates the nature and scale of the problem.
In 2015, when the United Nations was in the process of adopt…
Polio cases around have declined globally by more than 99 percent since 1988, but the type 1 poliovirus remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it has made a comeback this year and infected 102 people. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 20 2019 (IPS) – Efforts to wipe polio off the face of the planet took a step forward this week, with a multibillion-dollar fundraiser in the Middle East helping eradication schemes tackle a virus that disproportionately kills and cripples children in poor countries.
Donor governments and philanthropists pledged $2.6 billion on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi to immunise 450 million children against polio e…