Author Archive

Toxic Waste Victims Wait Years for Compensation

Inter Press Service: Thousands of victims affected by toxic waste dumping in 2006 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire's commercial capital, still have not received the economic compensation they were promised. "There is a complete lack of transparency as to what happened to the millions of dollars which should have been paid out by the government compensation scheme," Benedetta Lacey, special advisor on corporate accountability at Amnesty International, told IPS. According to a United Nations report published in 2009, toxic...

Somali Women Bear Superhuman Burden

Inter Press Service: While the exit of the Al-Qaeda-backed rebel group Al Shabaab has led to the first U.N. relief airlift in five years in the capital of famine-wracked Somalia, the situation for women and children remains precarious, humanitarian workers warn. "We have heard very sad stories of women having to abandon their children along the way because they were too weak to carry them," Andreas Needham, a public information officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Somalia (UNHCR), told IPS. The...