Father Edwin Gariguez is a Catholic priest from the Philippines. He currently serves as the Executive Secretary of the National Secretariat for Social Action, the advocacy and social development arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2012 for leading a grassroots movement against an illegal mining project to protect Mindoro Island’s biodiversity and its indigenous people.
Candlelight vigil co-organised by 350.org, the global grassroots climate movement, held just before the Pope’s visit to the Philippines in January this year. Photo credit: LJ Pasion
MANILA, Jun …
At night, groups of people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) community gather in meeting spots like this one in the El Vedado neighbourhood in Havana, Cuba. Others go to cruising spots for quick anonymous sex. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
HAVANA, Nov 13 2015 (IPS) – When night falls, young men can be seen sitting on a dismantled bus stop on a remote hill far from the centre of the C…
Credit: Anne Holmes/IPS
Mombasa, Kenya, Apr 7 2016 (IPS) – There is a ‘Little Boy’ who has nothing to do with the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. This time it is about another ‘Little Boy’ who has been devastating the harvests in many regions, especially in Africa.
This ‘Little Boy’ (from El Niño in Spanish) is a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific including the coasts of South America. In Latin America the term El Niño refers to the Child Jesus, so named because the pool of warm water in the Pacific near South America is often at its …
May 30 2016 – It is easy to miss stories about child domestic workers being tortured and killed. Easy because stories of children being killed have become eerily regular. It is May 28 and there is the report of 14-year-old Konika Rani being hacked to death by a drug addict with three of her classmates also grievously injured by him. There is also the horror of having to read about a six-year-old being left critically wounded after being raped by her neighbour. Next to this is the news of 11-year-old Hasina Akhter dying in hospital from the fatal wounds inflicted on her, presumably by her employers.
It s hard to choose which incident merits more atte…
Margaret Chan (left), Director-General of the World Health Organization visiting Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis in December 2014.
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2016 (IPS) – Health problems increasingly transcend the borders of the World Health Organization’s 194 member states, a challenge which the six candidates vying to lead the global body must address with care.
Those 194 member states will pick the next Director-General of the world’s peak health body in May 2017, after the current six candidates are whittled down by the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board in January. The successful candidate will replace current Director-General Dr Margare…
The author is professor of peace studies, dr hc mult, is founder of the and rector of the . He has published 164 books on peace and related issues, of which 41 have been translated into 35 languages, for a total of 135 book translations, including ‘,’ published by the .
ALICANTE, Spain, Mar 14 2017 (IPS) – Wikipedia has much to offer under aging . Highly recommended are the 10 points by the world s oldest living man, 114, Walter Breuning.
Johan Galtung
However, older persons, like me at 86, know their own aging best. Less trouble with oxidant stress as a major cause, having used anti-oxidants based on blueberry skin–no chemicals–for decades…
Though not a human health risk, Tilapia Lake Virus has large potential impact on global food security and nutrition. Credit: FAO
ROME, May 29 2017 (IPS) – A highly contagious disease is spreading among farmed and wild tilapia, one of the world s most important fish for human consumption, the United Nations warns, adding that though not a human health risk, Tilapia Lake Virus has large potential impact on global food security and nutrition.
The outbreak should be treated with concern and countries importing tilapias should take appropriate risk-management measures intensifying diagnostics testing, enforcing health certificates, deploying quarantine measures and developi…
Raghav Gaiha, is (Honorary) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England; and Vani S. Kulkarni is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, USA).
NEW DELHI and PHILADELPHIA, Oct 31 2017 (IPS) – Undernutrition is widespread and a key reason for poor child health in many developing countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, around 40 percent of children under the age of five suffer from stunted growth, that is, severely reduced height-for-age relative to their growth potential. Stunting is a result of periods of undernutrition in early childhood, and it has been found to have a series of adverse long-term effects in those who survive childhood. It is negatively associated with mental development, human capital accumulation, adult heal…
FGM is a taboo and complicated topic in Liberia and it is dangerous for women to speak out about it. Credit: Travis Lupick / IPS
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 2018 (IPS) – More than 200 million women around the world have experienced some kind of female genital mutilation (FGM) and more could be at risk, a UN agency said.
Though the practice has declined in prevalence globally, alarming new figures from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) predict that any progress could be off-set as a further 68 million girls face the risk of FGM by 2030.
The statistics from the UN were unveiled today as the world marks the 15th International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Geni…
ROME, May 14 2018 (IPS) – Many believe that the food and agricultural sector is different to all other economic sectors, that it is unique, and that it requires special economic models to thrive. After all, we expect the global food and agricultural system to respond to many different goals. It needs to deliver abundant, safe, and nutritious food. It needs to create employment in rural areas while protecting forests and wildlife, improving landscapes, and preventing climate change through lower food production emissions. Well-functioning food systems are also considered essential for social stability and conflict prevention. In fact many politicians today go as far as to argue that food systems need to thrive so as to stem rural-to-urban migration and the cross-border flow of desperate …