กรุงเทพฯ, ประเทศไทย (วันที่ 11 เมษายน พ.ศ. 2567) – เน็ตมาร์เบิ้ล ผู้พัฒนาและให้บริการเกมมือถือคุณภาพสูงชั้นนำ ได้ปล่อยอัปเดตใหม่สำหรับเกมแนว Collectible RPG อย่าง Tower of God: New World ! โดยอัปเดตในครั้งนี้ก็พร้อมมอบความสนุกสนานผ่านเพื่อนร่วมทีมคน�…

Jason Nardi

HONG KONG, Dec 19 2005 (IPS) – The hidden story behind the final draft of the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference s declaration lies in TRIPs, or trade-related intellectual property rights.
Folded into the technical language are many clauses and binding provisions that could have as many activists are denouncing devastating effects on peoples lives, denying them access to fundamental resources.

India s Trade Minister Kamal Nath was emphatic in his official statement last week when he asked the ministerial meeting to pave the way for the launch of serious negotiations on the issues pertaining to relationship between the TRIPs and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

We are up against a wall of obduracy in a handful of developed coun…

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Feb 6 2006 (IPS) – The best way to prevent water-borne diseases is to provide people with clean water-that seems obvious. So when Dr. Sharad Onta saw United States researchers arrive in Nepal to test a vaccine for hepatitis E on local people, he started asking why the money was not being spent on that simple solution.
Now, a decade later, the company licensed to market a hepatitis-E vaccine (HEV) developed by the U.S. military, says the Nepal clinical trials were successful and it is close to marketing it. That has revived a debate over whether Nepali citizens had been used as guinea pigs for the research.

Did the people being tested clearly understand what their bodies were being used for? Will they, and other Nepalis, benefit? And, Onta s conc…

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Mar 10 2006 (IPS) – The mood at this year s 40th International Tourism Board travel fair, now at the halfway stage in Berlin, is remarkably buoyant despite avian bird flu scares and continuing terrorist threats in some parts of the world.
Of the more than 10,500 exhibitors from 181 countries at the show, most are predicting worldwide growth in 2006. A tourism boom is expected particularly in Spain, Greece, India, China, and some Middle East and Latin American countries.

While optimism prevails for the most part, the outlook is less positive for Turkey. Top European tour operators report a double-digit percentage drop in bookings, with operators blaming media coverage of the avian flu outbreak and other negative headlines for the slump.

No…

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Apr 12 2006 (IPS) – In a verdict that shocked human rights and child advocacy organisations, the bar association and the country s leading analysts, Portugal s Supreme Court ruled that corporal punishment of children with mental disabilities in a children s institution is not illegal.
The first to raise his voice was Humberto Santos, the president of the Portuguese Association of Disabled Persons (APD), who told the press Wednesday that he found the Supreme Court s defence of physical punishment disturbing and outrageous.

Physical punishment is unacceptable in and of itself, but is much more alarming and deeply repugnant when it is defended by a court of law, said Santos.

Late last year, a juvenile court in Setúbal, 40 km south of Li…

Wilson Johwa

JOHANNESBURG, May 10 2006 (IPS) – Silas Masindi was not entirely surprised by his HIV test results. The dapper garment trader, who discovered earlier this year that he was infected with the AIDS virus, admits to using condoms somewhat erratically before he remarried three years ago.
Silas Masindi* was not entirely surprised by his HIV test results. The dapper garment trader, who discovered earlier this year that he was infected with the AIDS virus, admits to using condoms somewhat erratically before he remarried three years ago.

I would meet a girl, use a condom, but after four months stop using them, he says.

But surprisingly his second wife, Grace, does not have the virus. The pair has joined other couples which have a mismatched HIV status, so…

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 15 2006 (IPS) – The National Rifle Assocation, one of the most influential pro-gun lobbies in the United States, has philosophically argued that guns don t kill people, only people kill people .
But Oxfam, the international relief organisation based in London, raises that argument to a more realistic level: it s bullets that kill people. The bullet trade is out of control, says Oxfam, and it is fuelling conflict and human rights abuses worldwide.

Oxfam Director Barbara Stocking points out that in June 2003, during the height of the civil war in Liberia, one of the warring factions ran out of bullets and was forced to retreat.

But once a new shipment arrived, they attacked again, this time ferociously, killing many innocent peo…

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jul 26 2006 (IPS) – It was only after a sharp rise in the number of patients with the same symptoms in southern Serbian town Leskovac that doctors began to look for the cause.
More than 200 patients said they had eaten tomatoes sold at a tenth of the usual price. The tomatoes were sent for examination, and initial lab results showed that patients had suffered poisoning, most probably from the excessive doses of pesticides.

After that, the question is getting louder in Serbia: What do we really eat?

This is destroying the myth of Serbia being a home for healthily grown food, leading agriculture analyst Zaharije Trnavcevic told IPS. Re-integration into European trends and greed for quick profits, plus the lack of adequate control…

Nityanand Jayaraman

BHOPAL, Sep 1 2006 (IPS) – After an appellate court in the United States rejected claims by Bhopal city residents, seeking compensation from Union Carbide for environmental contamination around the site of the world s worst industrial disaster, plans are afoot to have the case transferred to India.
Every setback presents us with new opportunities and only strengthens our resolve, Satinath Sarangi, of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action (BGIA), one of several activist groups working with the survivors of a runaway reaction in Union Carbide s pesticides plant in this central Indian city in December 1984, that left an estimated 3,500-7,500 people dead and many more maimed.

Without ruling on whether or not Union Carbide ought to remediate the …

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