Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Apr 13 2008 (IPS) – While millions of children s lives have been saved as a result of a successful worldwide campaign to boost vaccination programmes, governments across the world are failing in following through on their commitments to health aid and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Wealthy countries such as the G8 members continue to content themselves with largely symbolic gestures. We have to make sure that the pledge made by governments (on MDGs)is followed, eminent medical scientist Gustav Nossal told IPS.
Global resources for fighting AIDS, Tuberculosis and malaria now total eight billion US dollars a year. The amount should be several times more than this. After all, we are only talking about the price of a couple of jet fighter…
Diana Mendoza interviews BIENVENIDO OPLAS, JR., small government advocate
MANILA, Jan 12 2010 (IPS) – As president of an independent think tank advocating minimal government, Bienvenido Oplas, Jr. believes that a society will be more peaceful and dynamic if people will assume more individual and voluntary responsibilities over their lives, their families and their communities.
This, according to Oplas, is the essence of ‘civil society and what the Minimal Government (MG) Thinkers, Inc. stands for.
People who are afraid of responsibilities are afraid of freedom itself, he says on his organisation s website. It is big and intrusive government that often rewards individual irresponsibility with subsidies and welfare.
Composed of a group of professionals and s…
NEW YORK, Mar 11 2015 (IPS) – The somber face of a young man from Sierra Leone has become the emblem of Ebola’s living survivors, suffering in silence without families, papers, or homes.
A photo of Jimmy Thoronka appeared this week in local British papers. An undeclared refugee, he went missing after competing in last summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The 20-year-old was a star sprinter but fell apart as Ebola took his uncle, then his adoptive mother and four siblings. He had already lost his birth parents in the country’s civil war.
Scared to go back, he decided to stay on after his visa ran out.
Thus began a seven-month spell of ‘living rough” on the streets. There were days without meals, sleeping in parks or night buses in London. When his whe…