The UN’s top human rights official insisted on Friday that the Israeli Government must not pursue a complete takeover of the Gaza Strip.

AWAZA, Turkmenistan, August 7 (IPS) - “Progress towards gender equality and equity remains uneven and far too slow. One in four women in landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) live in extreme poverty, and this is nearly 75 million women,” said Rabab Fatima, Secretary-General of the Third United Nations Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries or LLDC3 ongoing in Awaza, Turkmenistan.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, August 7 (IPS) - On August the first, the Italian daily La Repubblica published an interview with David Grossman, Israel’s most renown author and supporter of a “two-state solution”, as well as an outspoken critic of Israel’s violence against Palestinian civilians.

AWAZA, Turkmenistan, August 7 (IPS) - Once relegated to the periphery of Africa’s economic map due to their lack of coastline, the continent’s landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) are now reframing their geographic constraints as gateways to opportunity.

MUMBAI, India, August 7 (IPS) - It’s a quiet code with a loud message: “Ask for Angela.”

RIO DE JANEIRO, August 7 (IPS) - Residents near the port of Itajaí in southern Brazil celebrated the arrival of 7,292 electric and hybrid vehicles from China aboard the ship BYD Shenzhen on May 28 as a “historic event,” with unloading taking four days. 

TOKYO / ASTANA, August 7 (IPS) - Eighty years ago, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a lasting reminder to humanity of the inhuman nature of nuclear weapons. Kazakhstan, too, is a nation deeply scarred by nuclear tests conducted during the Soviet era. Having covered the activities of Soka Gakkai International (SGI) in Kazakhstan—including its support for exhibitions and documentary productions on nuclear abolition in Astana—, INPS Japan recently interviewed Zhanna Shayakhmetova, editor-in-chief of The Astana Times, a leading English-language newspaper in the country that continues to convey messages of disarmament and peace to the world. In the interview, Shayakhmetova spoke about the role of religious leaders who will gather in Astana from around the world this September, the importance of passing on memories to younger generations, and the responsibility journalism holds in this endeavor.

NEW YORK, August 7 (IPS) - The contamination of pharmaceutical medicines through toxic excipients is killing many and harming others. The UN agencies for health and drugs and crime warn that systemic vulnerabilities in the global supply chain have been exploited to introduce industrial-grade toxic chemicals into medicines, harming thousands of people, including children.

UNITED NATIONS, August 7 (IPS) - The humanitarian situation in Haiti has deteriorated significantly in the past few weeks, with the United Nations (UN) underscoring a growing list of abuses committed by armed groups, including killings, kidnappings, and sexual violence. The gap between the vast scale of needs and the supply of available resources has widened, leaving millions of Haitians in dire need of humanitarian support.

VIENNA, Austria, August 7 (IPS) - On 16th July this year I was at the University of Chicago, attending a Nobel Laureate Assembly, and visited the site where at 15:25 PM local time on 2 December 1942, the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining atomic fission chain reaction.