The Week With IPS 8/29

	The Gambia’s Democratic Space ‘Constricted, Restricted and Shrinking’ Ahead of 2016 Polls Saikou Jammeh With the approach of the Gambia’s 2016 presidential elections, which will see President Yahya Jammeh seek re-election for a fifth, five-year tenure, more than a dozen opposition activists have been arrested, detained and prosecuted in the past eight months. The leader of the opposition United ... MORE > >
	OPINION: Towards a Global Governance Information Clearing House Ramesh Jaura Inter Press Service News Agency has braved severe political assaults and financial tempests since 1964, when Roberto Savio and Pablo Piacentini laid its foundation as a unique and challenging information and communication system. Fifty years on, IPS continues to provide in-depth news and ... MORE > >
	How Midwives on Sierra Leone’s Almost Untouched Turtle Islands are Improving Women’s Health Joan Erakit Emmanuel is a male midwife. At the age of 26, he lives and works on one of eight islands off the southwest peninsular of Sierra Leone, an hour by speedboat from Mattru Jong, the capital of Bonthe District. On a particularly hot Wednesday morning, IPS joins Marie Stopes, United Nations ... MORE > >
	Building Public Trust is a Key Factor in Fighting West Africa’s Worst Ebola Outbreak Marc-Andre Boisvert The nurse carefully packs the body into a plastic bag and then leaves the isolation tent, rinsing his feet in a bucket of water that contains bleach. Then he carefully takes off his safety glasses, gloves and mask and burns them in a jerry can. Behind a cordon, hundreds of people are watching, ... MORE > >
	These Children Just Want to Go Back to School Ashfaq Yusufzai Between government efforts to wipe out insurgents from Pakistan’s northern, mountainous regions, and the Taliban’s own campaign to exercise power over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the real victims of this conflict are often invisible. Walking among the rubble of their old ... MORE > >
	The Time for Burning Coal Has Passed Claudia Ciobanu and Silvia Giannelli “People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19th and 20th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand ... MORE > >
	U.N. Conference Set to Bypass Climate Change Refugees Thalif Deen An international conference on small island developing states (SIDS), scheduled to take place in Samoa next week, will bypass a politically sensitive issue: a proposal to create a new category of "environmental refugees" fleeing tiny island nations threatened by rising seas. "It's not on the ... MORE > >
	When Land Restoration Works Hand in Hand with Poverty Eradication Stella Paul Tugging at the root of a thorny shrub known as ‘juliflora’, which now dots the village of Chirmiyala in the Medak District of southern India’s Telangana state, a 28-year-old farmer named Ailamma Arutta tells IPS, “This is a curse that destroyed my land.” The deciduous shrub, whose scientific ... MORE > >
	Innovation Offers Hope in Sri Lanka’s Poverty-Stricken North Amantha Perera In this dust bowl of a village deep inside Sri Lanka’s former conflict zone, locals will sometimes ask visitors to rub their palms on the ground and watch their skin immediately take on a dark bronze hue, proof of the fertility of the soil. Village lore in Oddusuddan, located in the Mullaitivu ... MORE > >
	Migrants Deported from the U.S. in Limbo on the Mexican Border Daniela Pastrana The areas under the low bridges over a section of the canalised channel of the Tijuana River that runs along the border between Mexico and the United States have become enormous open-air toilets. Along the entire two-km stretch from the eastern part of Tijuana to the wall on the U.S. border, ... MORE > >
	Women’s Football Struggles for Equal Rights In Uganda Amy Fallon Growing up with five brothers, soccer-mad Majidah Nantanda had half a team to compete against at home in Makindye, a suburb in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. But at her school, in the 1990s, there were two sports rules: “Netball for the girls and football for the boys,” recalls the 32-year-old, as she ... MORE > >