Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Feb 12 2007 (IPS) – It took more than three decades of struggle by activists for Portugal to give the green light, via referendum, to parliament to make the country s strict anti-abortion law more flexible.
In Sunday s referendum, 59 percent of voters responded yes and 41 percent responded no to the question Do you agree with the decriminalisation of abortion if it is performed in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, at the request of the woman, in a legal medical establishment?
Turnout stood at 44 percent of the country s 8.7 million voters.
The vote revoked a 1998 referendum in which voters decided against legalising abortion, in the first attempt to modify the 1984 Portuguese law that makes abortion illegal unless the mother s life is …
Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) – World farmers are not part of the official delegations at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) food summit on food security that opened here Monday. But they came anyhow to express their views, since, they say, it is their communities that are most impacted by the food crisis.
Hortense Kinkodila of La Via Campesina in Congo Brazaville. Credit: Sabina Zaccaro/IPS
Small-scale producers from the Amazonian rainforest, from Africa, the Pacific islands and th…
Hannah Rubenstein
NEW YORK, Jul 9 2010 (IPS) – I was baking a cake when my contractions were two minutes apart, Kristine says, her voice warm with memory, not in a hospital, holding onto a bedside somewhere screaming.
She speaks of her experience tenderly. I felt like giving birth was in my hands, having it at home, she says, not on a doctor s schedule, in somebody else s hands. By the time my daughter was born, I felt like my midwife was a part of my family.
Kristine is one of more than 300,000 women in the United States who choose to give birth with the help of a midwife each year, and one of approximately 40,000 women who give birth at home. Both of her daughters, now aged 22 months and 11 weeks, were attended at birth by a midwife in Kristine s home. If she has …
An open drainage ditch in Ankorondrano-Andranomahery, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Madagascar’s capital city. Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 21 2013 (IPS) – Even as the United Nations laments the fact that more than 2.5 billion people in the developing world are still without adequate sanitation, both Japan and South Korea have gone upscale: offering automated toilets and piped-in classical music.
Although at a hackers conference in Las Vegas last month, high-tech experts confessed that virtually all computerised devices, including toilets, are vulnerable to hacking.
The Wall Street Journal quoted a 27-year-old U.S.-…
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Dec 15 2015 (IPS) – Successive poor harvests have diminished Ndodana Makhalima s household food stocks and the family’s nutrition status.
A subsistence farmer in Lupane, about 110 kilometres north of Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, 56 year-old Makhalima has learnt to live with hunger on his door step.
Farmers will have limited access to climate smart agricultural knowledge and skills as cash strapped Zimbabwe cuts technical assistance from agricu…
is the Regional Director of the South East Asia Region of WHO.
NEW YORK, Jun 7 2016 (IPS) – Thailand has provided the world with an important milestone towards the global goal of ending pediatric AIDS. This week, the World Health Organization is formally declaring that Thailand has officially eliminated new HIV infections among children.
Whereas in 2000 an estimated 1000 children in Thailand were newly infected with HIV, in 2015 just – 85 children were infected with the disease. This very low level of new infection among children is comparable to the results achieved in North America and Western Europe, where mother-to-child HIV transmission is extremely rare.
Last year, Cuba became the first country to be officially acknowledged as having eliminated mother-to-c…
ILLINOIS, United States, Apr 6 2020 (IPS) – During a crisis, such as the novel , whose impact changes with every passing minute, the urge to listen to and watch the news, and get firsthand insights and real time updates can be constant. Indeed, millions of Americans are frequently checking the news. I know I am. What I’ve noticed on three of the major TV stations I’ve watched across the day is the absence of diversity in the experts commenting on the pandemic. This is inexcusable.
…
Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait
NEW YORK, Aug 19 2020 (IPS) – There are moments when the world has no choice but to come together. Those moments become historic turning points. This is one of them. We are now faced with the greatest education emergency of our time. Over one billion children are out of school. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis of such magnitude and depth that the next generation might neither have the capacity and tools, nor the will, to rebuild let alone build back better.
Yasmine Sherif
The world has not planned well for the future. At its worst, education has for too long been underprioritized, and at i…
With the rise in COVID-19 cases fueled by new variants, the number of long COVID cases will keep increasing. Credit: Unsplash/Ivan Diaz
ABUJA, Sep 1 2022 (IPS) – More than two-years in, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on with rising cases and deaths every day. A silent and more long-term pandemic occurring simultaneously is long COVID. The impact of long COVID has serious consequences for the future of humanity and should worry us all.
The recent by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control shows that an average of 14% of US adults report long COVID symptoms. This is staggering because 93 million cases have been reported in the U.S. This implies that 13 million peop…