by Zofeen Ebrahim, Inter Press Service, Italy - ’For you it’s just another story. If you want the truth go to Ghazni where you will get more than I can ever tell you about my sister," said a distraught Fouzia Siddiqi, speaking with IPS, in a voice breaking with helpless desperation.
by Emma Batha, Reuters AlertNet, UK - Thousands of people uprooted during the fighting over South Ossetia will be risking their lives when they return home because of unexploded or abandoned munitions, aid workers and weapons experts warn.
by Mercedes Sayagues, Inter Press Service, Italy - What do they have in common -- the landless widow with a deaf son in Bangladesh, the 12-year-old miner in Kyrgyzstan, the Ugandan farming couple with 12 children and the South African domestic worker who loses her home when her husband dies and her job when she breaks a leg? They, and their children, are trapped in chronic poverty, even as their countries show economic growth.
by Aunohita Mojumdar, Al Jazeera, Qatar - With five million refugees repatriated since 2001 and three million still harboured mainly in Pakistan and Iran, Afghanistan continues to face formidable challenges in addressing the needs of its refugee population.
by Daniela Estrada, Inter Press Service, Italy - "In my community, living with HIV is synonymous with death," Fernando Solís, a 34-year-old member of the Cuna ethnic group in Panama, told IPS. Solís, who was diagnosed four years ago, is now working in prevention efforts among other young indigenous people, which he described as "the key to eradicating the epidemic in our communities."
by Maria Appakova, RIA Novosti, Russia - Mauritania has endured five coups and nine aborted attempts to change the political system since the early 1960s, and this event might have been nothing new but for one "if."
by Pilirani Semu-Banda, Inter Press Service, Italy - Gladys Mawera's face is contorted with pain -– both she and her newborn baby survived a complicated birth three days ago -- but she has not been able to take the painkillers and antibiotics prescribed to her by the medical personnel at the Chiradzulu District Hospital in southern Malawi. The hospital has been without water for five days.
by Zofeen Ebrahim, Inter Press Service, Italy - While three million people are receiving treatment, every day 7,400 new HIV infections crop up -- 2.7 million new infections a year.
by Anna Johnson, Associated Press, USA - In this small Nile River farming village, Maha Mohammed has started to doubt whether she should circumcise her two daughters.
by Marie Valla, France 24, France - After years of tense relations, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast signaled reconciliation with a three-day visit by Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo in Ouagadougou. Gbagbo vowed to make the two countries the 'backbone' of West Africa.
by Patricia Grogg, Inter Press Service, Italy - Urban farming has taken off in Cuba over the last two decades, based on low-cost agro-ecological practices and a stable labour force, and could serve as a model for the rest of the agriculture sector in this period of reforms.
by Maya Schenwar, Truthout, USA - A new book from Foreign Policy in Focus explains what made the Iraq war possible, and how we can stop the factors that precipitated it before they breed.
by Audrey Brown, BBC News, UK - Fourteen years after Mr Mandela's new nation was born, the country's newspapers are still filled with stories of snubs and rejections as white establishments blatantly refuse to allow black people in.
by Keya Acharya, Inter Press Service, Italy - "We don’t know how to read or write, but we make our own films,’’ is how Narsamma, 42, a farmer from Pastapur village in Hyderabad, introduces herself and her colleagues.
by Mercedes Sayagues, Reuters AlertNet, UK - Swaziland has "circumcision Saturdays", for the convenience of the working man who does not want to miss work. Last year, teams of Israeli surgeons toured the tiny kingdom showing doctors how to snip foreskins nice and easy, fast and clean. Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia are rolling out male circumcision programmes and men are queuing at the clinics.
by Beena Sarwar, Inter Press Service, Italy - Some 7,000 death row inmates -- a quarter of the estimated condemned prisoners worldwide -- are expected to be spared and eventually freed following a call by Pakistan’s prime minister to honour the memory of the assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto.
by Soma Basu, Inter Press Service, Italy - Ponni, 27, lay quiet on a missionary hospital bed in this small town, groggy from the anaesthetic administered to her for a caesarean delivery a couple of hours earlier.
by Coco McCabe, Reuters AlertNet, UK - Justine Masika had long been interested in the well-being of poor rural women in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo when, in 1996, they began to come to her with reports of a new kind of horror.
by Mona Alami, Inter Press Service, Italy - Can beauty arise from conflict? When looking at the art scene in the Middle East, where a fault line of political instability stretches from Lebanon, Syria and Israel to Iraq and Iran, the answer seems to be a resounding 'yes'.
by Mercedes Sayagues, Inter Press Service, Italy - "As a child, I learned on the street that a woman should be beaten and I had to un-learn it," says Matombe.
by Kristin Palitza, Inter Press Service, Italy - Migrants are at elevated risk for HIV/AIDS and other diseases, yet routinely denied treatment.
by Ingrid Melander, Reuters, USA - Africa will press former colonial power France for less paternalism from Europe and more flexibility on migration and trade during the French European Union presidency starting on Tuesday.
by Heidi Holland, BBC News, UK - South African writer Heidi Holland is one of the last non-Zimbabwean journalists to have interviewed Robert Mugabe. She spent two hours with him last December after pursuing the Zimbabwean president for months. This is her description of that encounter.
by Constanza Vieira, Inter Press Service, Colombia - "When they bring in (heads that still have) eyes, we close them, because it’s sad to see that look of terror, as if the killers were reflected in their glassy eyes. Those armed men stuck in the depth of the eyes of the dead scare us; they look like they want to kill us too.
by Skye Wheeler, Inter Press Service, Italy - 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.
by Joanna Lillis, Eurasia Net, USA - Nearly two months after the European Union ruled that sanctions against Uzbekistan would remain suspended for six months, there are signs that Western governments continue to seek rapprochement with Tashkent.
by Katie Vandever, Inter Press Service, Italy - Two years after the African Union mandated Senegal to conduct the trial of Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, who is accused of thousands of political murders during his eight-year reign, the prosecution remains in limbo, six human rights groups complained in a joint statement Monday.
by Patricia Grogg, IPS News, Cuba - Cuba is paradoxically the same, yet not the same, under President Raúl Castro, who said he would change "everything that should be changed" to perfect the socialist path taken by the revolution nearly half a century ago. While most of the expected or predicted transformations have yet to materialise, the stage is being set by ending some of the prohibitions that particularly irritated a society educated for decades to be egalitarian.
by Emma Thomasson, Reuters, The Hague - Mexico asked the World Court on Thursday to take urgent steps to stop imminent U.S. executions of five Mexicans on death row who were denied their rights to consular assistance.
by Mona Alami, Inter Press Service, Lebanon - Prejudiced reporting is not uncommon anywhere, but in Lebanon the level of news distortion has taken on a new dimension as a result of assassinations, physical threats, political pressure, biased reporting, lack of professionalism, rampant corruption and self-censorship.
by Geraldine Desqueyroux-Quidu, France 24, France - Faced with a lack of health professionals, France is looking abroad for doctors. Yet, the new recruits have a hard time with integration and are demonstrating against what they say are unfair salary levels.
by Niluksi Koswanage, Reuters, Malaysia - A leader of Malaysia's Islamist party, which made surprising gains in March elections, wants its secular allies to apply strict sharia law, which include amputations and stonings for Muslims.
by Jane Elliott, BBC News, UK - When plastic surgeon Waseem Saeed came across a little girl who had lost her leg in the recent Chinese earthquake, he expected a child terrified of doctors and in great pain. But this little girl was sitting in bed reading a book and appeared to be in no pain.
by Mona Alami, IPS News, Lebanon - In the dark streets across from the main Hamra road, one of the major commercial arteries in Lebanese capital Beirut, light streams from behind the drapes of a first floor apartment. A politician's speech blaring from a TV resonates loudly in the night. As music cues the closing credits of the show, sudden celebratory gunfire from the political figure's supporters erupts outside.
by Miren Gutierrez, IPS News, Italy - Observe any summit picture -- you won't find many women. The mystery of female underrepresentation in the echelons of power persists: after so many decades of the feminist movement, why are women at the helm scarce? A look at the media sector may provide some answers.
by Renee Maltezou and George Hatzidakis, Reuters, Greece - Greece's first gay weddings were held on Tuesday when two couples, abetted by a sympathetic local mayor, defied the threat of criminal charges and the wrath of the Orthodox church to tie the knot on a tiny Aegean island. One gay and one lesbian couple took advantage of the failure of Greek civil law to specify gender in matrimony and took vows at municipal offices on the southeast Aegean island of Tilos.
by Aileen Kwa, IPS News, Italy - Metals and mineral mining have been notorious for the "resource curse" they have inflicted on the communities who live where they are mined. Today, as prices are high, the appetites of these mining companies are on the increase.
by Miriam Mannak, IPS News, Italy - As of May 28, the City of Cape Town had registered 18,861 refugees from xenophobic attacks that have destroyed homes and looted shops owned by migrants in many of the city's poorer neighbourhoods. But some foreigners in even the most badly-affected townships of Cape Town have no desire to leave their homes and are determined to stay put.
by Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, Italy - The national mourning observed this week for victims of the Sichuan earthquake is the first public remembrance in modern China’s history ordered to commemorate ordinary people rather than political leaders. At 2:28 on Monday afternoon, exactly a week after the quake hit the remote hillsides of southwestern China, the country came to a standstill, mourning the 50,000 people estimated to have perished in the tragedy.
by Emma Graham-Harrison, Reuters, China - While Indonesia appears set to raise prices as soon as this week, the world's fastest-growing oil users show little inclination to tackle their subsidy schemes, as fighting food-fuelled inflation has become their top priority. That's bad news for oil consumers in the rest of the world, who face record crude costs partly as a result of demand growing unchecked in countries where pump prices have barely risen since the middle of 2006 -- when crude was in the $70s.
by Stephanie Nieuwoudt, IPS, Italy - Is small the new big when it comes to agriculture in Southern Africa? As rising food prices place this sector firmly in the spotlight, there are compelling examples at hand to make the case for greater investment in small-scale farming.
by Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, Italy - Rattled by rapidly rising global grain prices, China is looking at strategies to ensure long-term food security for its 1.3 billion people such as procuring farmland overseas and opposing the formation of any international grain price- fixing monopolies.
by Bernarda Claure, IPS, Italy - Efforts by Bolivia’s land reform authorities to free 167 Guaraní families living in servitude in Alto Parapetí, a rural area in the eastern Bolivian lowlands province of Santa Cruz, have brought to light a phenomenon that had remained largely hidden and ignored until now in the country’s vast Chaco plains region.
by Elaine Lies, Reuters, Japan - Unlike the old days when girls would become geisha through personal connections, 23-year-old Komomo (Little Peach) took her first steps towards the vocation by e-mail.
by Daniela Desantis, Reuters, Paraguay - A sandal-wearing former bishop's presidential election victory suggests Paraguay's democracy has matured, but after 61 years of one-party rule his political foes may dictate the pace of change. Fernando Lugo, a mild-mannered leftist who quit the cloth three years ago saying he felt powerless to help Paraguay's poor, ousted the ruling Colorado Party in Sunday's election with promises to tackle inequality and stamp out corruption.
by Simba Russeau, IPS, Italy - Adam, 32, left his wife and newborn daughter in northern Nigeria five years back to seek employment in Lebanon. He had a contract offering him 200 dollars a month to work in a cell phone shop in Hamra, Beirut. One in five people in Lebanon is now a temporary worker from outside, mostly Africa. That means close to a million, for a Lebanese population of four million. It's a struggle for these workers, but not everyone is complaining.
by Kim Gamel and Bushra Juhi, AP, Iraq - It was another deadly explosion quickly forgotten by the outside world. But Aug. 1, 2007, changed the life of 28-year-old Maysa Sharif. It was the day she became one of nearly a million Iraqi women who have lost husbands as the country has suffered through three wars and Saddam Hussein's murderous regime.
