IPS Picks of the Week 3/28

	Côte d’Ivoire’s Middle Class - Growing or Disappearing? Marc-Andre Boisvert “I’m middle class. Definitively,” Sonia Anoh, a young and independent 30-year-old Ivorian tells IPS. Anoh has a master’s degree, earns 1,470 dollars a month working in marketing, lives alone, owns a car and is now shopping for a home. But while Anoh freely talks about her economic status, not ... MORE > >
	Non-Nuclear Ukraine Haunts Security Summit in The Hague Thalif Deen The two-day, much-ballyhooed Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in the Netherlands, which concluded Tuesday, was politically haunted by the upheaval in Ukraine - the former Soviet republic that renounced some 1,800 of its nuclear weapons in one of the world's most successful disarmament exercises back ... MORE > >
	Ethiopia’s Textile Manufacturers Benefit from Global Interest James Jeffrey The sign for Salem’s directs you off a busy road in Addis Ababa, down a side street to a compound where multiple pairs of feet move up and down working treadles, and wooden shuttles flit back and forth, as Ethiopian sheumanoch — weavers — ply their trade. Seated at their looms, most appear to be ... MORE > >
	A Honduran Paradise that Doesn’t Want to Anger the Sea Again Thelma Mejía At the mouth of the Aguán river on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, a Garífuna community living in a natural paradise that was devastated 15 years ago by Hurricane Mitch has set an example of adaptation to climate change. “We don’t want to make the sea angry again, we don’t want a repeat of what ... MORE > >
	Fighting a 'Losing' War With the Taliban Ashfaq Yusufzai Pakistan is in the midst of a heated debate on continuing military operations against the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), especially after the brutal killing of 23 army soldiers last month. Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan claims that the government acknowledges ... MORE > >
	Increased Instability Predicted for Egypt Jim Lobe International human rights groups have strongly denounced Monday’s sentencing by an Egyptian court of 529 Islamists to death for a riot in which one policeman was killed. Egypt specialists here say the sentences, which are widely seen as the latest in a series of steps taken by the authorities ... MORE > >
	Anger Rises Over Racism in India Bijoyeta Das L. Khino, 27, vividly remembers Christmas Eve at the Indian capital’s famed Connaught Place shopping hub four years ago: the blinking lights, the buzzing crowd, the winter chill - and the salty taste of her tears. Khino had just arrived in New Delhi from her home in India’s northeastern state of ... MORE > >
	Ukraine Confronts Another Split Zack Baddorf In Donetsk’s Lenin Square, Yuroslav Korotenko keeps a constant vigil inside a tent erected just a few feet away from a massive statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. “We stay here and save this monument and this place, because people in the West come this place with war,” Korotenko told IPS. ... MORE > >
	Injecting HIV Into Pakistan Ashfaq Yusufzai Pakistan may have low prevalence of HIV/AIDS, with only about 9,000 officially confirmed cases, but the country is at high risk, particularly due to a growing number of injecting drug users (IDUs), say experts. Of the country’s 180 million people, 420,000 are IDUs according to the Drug Use in ... MORE > >