http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78100 \\

BEIRUT, 8 May 2008 (IRIN) - Ramzi Ali was nearly 13 when his parents took him out of school to work as a motorbike mechanic.

"Conditions are hard, and political tensions are destroying the country," said Ali, now 14, as he manned a barricade of burning tyres in central Beirut on 7 May. "My parents just couldn't afford to keep me at school any more."

Anti-government protesters blocked roads with burning tyres across the Lebanese capital on 7 May after Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, and an allied Christian party, threw their weight behind a general strike called by the country's union federation to demand higher wages and decry high prices.

A pall of smoke hovered above a city of shuttered shops and empty roads, as workers either obeyed the strike call or stayed at home for fear of the sectarian violence that flares up periodically in Beirut and stokes fears of civil war.

Gunmen exchanged fire in central areas of Beirut that are mixed Sunni and Shia Muslim, and therefore divided between supporters of the Sunni Future Movement, part of the pro-Western governing coalition, and the Shia opposition Hezbollah and Amal parties.

The strike was called by labour unions after rejecting a last-minute government increase in the monthly minimum wage from US$200 to $330. Recent research by Lebanese economic consultancy InfoPro found that wages averaged $500 while the actual minimum wage was around $320, making the increase irrelevant to most workers.

Prices up

Prices of basic commodities have spiked over the past month.

....

Personal testimonies

Mahmoud, an unemployed 20-year-old at the barricade who preferred not to give his full name, said rising prices and low wages made it harder for young men to get ahead.

"At this rate, I'll never get married," he said. "You have to work several jobs at once just to make ends meet, and it's hard even to find one... Women don't want to marry a man who can't afford even to rent his own home," he said.

Both young men, who said they were Hezbollah supporters from the mainly Shia Muslim southern suburbs of Beirut, blamed the government for Lebanon's worsening living conditions.
 

BEIRUT, 28 January 2008 (IRIN) -

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=76455 

OLD Article,  

Deadly Shia riots in southern Beirut protesting over power and water cuts have occurred because these basic services have become part of the country's increasingly tense political stand-off, said protesters and analysts.

At least eight people were killed and 22 wounded as gunfire and grenades erupted after an official with Shia opposition group Amal was shot dead during a confrontation between angry demonstrators and the army on 27 January.

Opposition protesters, who said they had received only four hours of electricity and water over the past few days, used blazing tyres to block several main roads around south Beirut, including the highway to the airport, burned several cars, threw grenades and smashed shop windows.

"The government is punishing the Shia because we are the opposition," 21-year-old protester Ali Abdullah told IRIN at the scene of the riot in Mar Mikhael, where several people were killed in gunfights and explosions. The fighting began between the army and Amal supporters but spread to include gunmen from the neighbouring Christian-majority neighbourhoods and led to the deaths of several Hezbollah supporters.

"Life in this neighbourhood is very hard," said Abdullah. "We don't have enough power or water and no money and few job prospects."

"Punished"

Ahmed Mousali, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, said basic service provision had become part of the political deadlock that has pitched the Western-backed government against a Shia-and-Christian opposition backed by Iran and Syria, and left Lebanon without a president, parliament or fully functioning cabinet.

"Certain areas of Beirut have been punished by the government by having electricity shortages and the threat of rising bread prices," he said, referring to the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, where several protests have taken place over the past three months against power cuts.

The government denies politicising the electricity supply, arguing that many households in the southern suburbs tap power off the mains system without paying for it, which causes short-circuits and blackouts. 

By Stephanie Nebehay

Source: ReliefWeb

URL: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/PANA-7EGEEZ?OpenDocument 

GENEVA, May 9 (Reuters) - The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on May 23 to examine how the world's food crisis is undermining the right to food for millions of people, officials said on Friday.

The rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger are enshrined in international law as basic, universal human rights. The request was submitted by Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan and approved by 41 of the Council's 47 member states.

In a statement, the sponsors said that while middle-class families in the Western world spend about 20 percent of their budgets on food, for families in developing countries it can make up 60 to 80 percent of their incomes.

"This rise in the price of food, in addition to increased logistical costs linked to the price of oil, makes it difficult for the international agencies to meet the demands imposed on them, since the costs of providing food relief have considerably gone up," the sponsors said.

Protests, strikes and riots have erupted in some 40 poorer countries around the world after dramatic rises in the prices of wheat, rice, corn, oils and other essential foods.

More than 850 million people worldwide are thought to be facing acute food shortages, and another 2 billion suffering from malnutrition, which the World Health Organisation has said can cause life-long health problems for children.

People in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have been most strongly affected by the food price spikes that economists have linked to factors including drought, high fuel and fertiliser costs, the use of crops for biofuels, and commodity speculation.

Olivier De Schutter, the new U.N. food envoy, last week called for the Council to hold a special session this month to address what he said was a "massive violation" of human rights.

De Schutter said the food crisis was man-made and likened it to a "silent tsunami". He called for a freeze on new investment in biofuels and the abandonment of U.S. and European Union targets on biofuel use.

(Additional reporting by Laura MacInnis, editing by Mark Trevelyan)

By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - Cleaner air due to reduced coal burning could help destroy the Amazon this century, according to a finding published on Wednesday that highlights the complex challenges of global climate change.

The study in the journal Nature identified a link between reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from coal burning and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic that boosts the drought risk in the Amazon rainforest.

With the rainforest already threatened by development, higher global temperatures could tip the balance, they said.

"Generally pollution is a bad thing but in this case improving the air may have ironically led to a drying of the Amazon," said Peter Cox, a researcher at the University of Exeter in Britain, who led the study.

"It shows you have to deal with greenhouse gases."

The Amazon -- the world's largest tropical rainforest -- plays a critical role in the global climate system because it contains about one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems.

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