News stories by Stella Paul, page 7

HYDERBAD, India, May 21 (IPS) - Amid the social distancing measures posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, coastal communities of Bangladesh and India face a double threat while the record-breaking storm Cyclone Amphan made the landfall yesterday (May 20).

UNAKOTI, India, May 04 (IPS) - As the sun sets over the hills, Prafulla Debbarma, a small tea grower in Dhanbilash village in north eastern India, walks along the labyrinth path of his farm and past a thick blanket of well-grown tea plants. In the fading light, the farmer appears deeply worried. This tea farm, the sole source of his livelihood, remains unharvested thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

HYDERABAD, India, May 01 (IPS) - Andrew Sam Raja Pandian, a digital journalist and founder of a news portal in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, was arrested for running two news articles related to COVID-19.

One of the articles exposed corruption in the government food aid distribution system, while the other highlighted doctors in Coimbatore city facing food issues. The city police first detained the journalist and photographer who had reported on the stories, Jerald Aruldas and M Balaji, for 9 hours before arresting Pandian for publishing the pieces.

NEW DEHLI, Apr 14 (IPS) - Arti Zodpe is from the Tamasha (folk dance-drama) theatre in Sangli, in India's Maharashtra state. After evening performances, some of the singers and dancers offer sex work services to the audience.

JAMPUI HILLS, India, Feb 24 (IPS) - India's Jampui Hills – a picturesque hill station in the north eastern province — has been know for decades as the Orange Bowl. But a changing climate has led farmers on a search for sustainable agriculture.

Hillol Datta, 26, travelled for two days from Kolkata to Jampui Hills – a picturesque hill station in the north eastern province of India – to see its fruit-laden orange orchards. However, after driving for several hours, all that the young traveller saw were bald patches along the hill slopes and scattered rows of areca (nut) palm trees.

DJIBOUTI CITY, Jan 29 (IPS) - Neema Namdamu, 42, grew up in the village of Bukavu in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo  where children with disabilities were considered a curse.

As a child Namdamu contracted polio, leaving her paralysed from the waist down. Her neighbours advised her mother to do what they felt was the "right thing": leave the child alone in a hut until she died of starvation.

DJIBOUTI CITY, Jan 27 (IPS) - Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh knows that his country is in need of an education system that is, "innovative, based on universal principles and values and adaptive of the local realities".

HYDERABAD, India, Jan 23 (IPS) - Sunday, Jan. 26, is World Leprosy Day, which is observed to raise awareness about the disease and those affected by it. IPS Senior Correspondent Stella Paul looks at how the disease is re-emerging as a global health challenge, particularly in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia.

Fifteen years ago, Sattamma – a daily labourer in the Rangareddy district of southern India's Telangana state – was abandoned by her husband after she was diagnosed with Hansen's Disease.

SHARM-EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Dec 18 (IPS) - On late Monday morning, a motley group of more than a thousand youth gathered in a hall in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to listen to Sophia — a humanoid robot capable of displaying humanlike expressions and interacting with people. Yahya Elghobashy, a computer science engineering student from Cairo, sat excitedly in the audience. A few meters away from him, also in the audience, was Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — the President of Egypt.

DHAKA, Bangladesh, Dec 13 (IPS) - Dr Rahat Chawdhury is the Deputy Program Manager at the National Leprosy Program of Bangladesh. His is the umbrella organization of hundreds of doctors, technical experts, counsellors, strategists, health advocates, field workers and thousands of leprosy-affected people as the beneficiaries.