Muddassir Rizvi
ISLAMABAD, May 14 2006 (IPS) – Islamabad is not the same too much traffic, too much smoke, too much noise. Our little heaven has become just another big city stripped of the tranquility it was once known for, a dejected Samina Shah said, as she waited at a traffic light on Blue Area Road, in Pakistan s capital.
An asthma patient, she wears a mask while driving her children to school in crawling traffic. Traffic jams are my worst nightmare. I just can t breathe, she lamented.
Pakistan s political capital is bursting with vehicles, the traffic police announced recently following a survey. As many as 143,886 vehicles enter Islamabad every day, said senior superintendent of Islamabad Traffic Police Sultan Azam Temuri.
A leafy city of over one milli…
Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO , Jun 9 2010 (IPS) – Twelve-year-old Tapuwa Bakare* darts through the traffic as irate motorists hoot at him and the tyres of speeding vehicles screech to a halt to avoid hitting him. Miraculously, the box filled with sweets and chewing gum that he carries does not fall from his grasp.
An AIDS orphan sits on an old bus seat. Zimbabwe has over one million AIDS orphans. Credit: IRIN
Bakare has things on his mind other than the traffic: he has a business to…
Tinus de Jager
JOHANNESBURG*, Nov 15 2010 (IPS) – Researchers are testing a new combination of tuberculosis drugs on patients in South Africa which they are hoping will shorten the treatment term of the disease to six months.
Examining a patient with drug-resistant TB. Credit: Dominic Chavez/IPS
I think I have lost my job, you know, says commuter taxi driver Paul Kyazze We are not like those office people, [we] have to be at work every day. Now I am here.
Kyazze is a TB patient at Uganda s Mulago National Referral Hospi…
Labourers urgently construct new roads ahead of the monsoon season in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong Rohingya camp. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS
DHAKA, Feb 28 2018 (IPS) – More than half a million Rohingya refugees crammed into over 30 makeshift camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeast Bangladesh face a critical situation as the cyclone and monsoon season begins in a few weeks’ time.
The United Nations and international and local NGOs, along with the Bangladeshi government, have issued emergency calls to safeguard the population, especially those who a…
LONDON, May 31 2022 (IPS) – At this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos which ended last week, the attention of the world’s financial and economic elite was captured by the war in Ukraine whose president Volodimir Zelensky used his address to call to “complete withdrawal of foreign businesses from the Russian market”, despite .
Many companies still present in Russia including HSBC that still maintains operations for existing clients, and Credit Suisse that is scaling them back without signalling that it would pull out of Russia due to the invasion. This is especially troubling given the leaked data in Suisse Secrets about how prior to the Russi…
A young child receives vaccine drops in Pakistan, but the region has experienced an upsurgence of cases because of vaccine refusal. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
PESHAWAR, Nov 29 2022 (IPS) – Vaccine refusal is impacting the eradication of polio in Pakistan.
Pakistan has vaccinated about 35 million children during its door-to-door campaign, but about 500,000 remained unvaccinated due to refusal by their parents, Jawad Khan Polio officer in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, recorded in 2022 so far.…