-The Christian Sciences Monitor Wealthy Western nations are financially exhausted and unwilling to commit to help fund greener development for poorer nations. Will this week's conference in Rio find any solutions? So what happens if you hold a UN conference on sustainable development, and world leaders make speeches, and sign treaties, and then nothing happens? This, of course, would be absurd. The problem, says Bill Easterly, a development expert at New York University,...

-The Times of India  Karnataka BJP president K S Eshwarappa on Sunday stirred up a hornet's nest, advising education minister Visvesvara Hegde Kageri to saffronise schools. Eshwarappa was speaking at a programme involving the education department's greening programme in Shimoga.  Appreciating the education minister's efforts for taking up planting of saplings in government schools, Eshwarappa said: "Children's books have a lot of thoughts on religion and culture. It is essential to preserve...

BANGALORE: There are no takers as yet for over 16,000 seats reserved for the underprivileged in city schools.  For instance, for 16,656 seats available in schools falling under the 25% quota in Bangalore South, only 2,384 applications have been filed. Similarly, for over 4,000 seats available in schools in Bangalore North, only 1,868 valid applications have been received by the BEOs.  According to RTE rules notified by the Karnataka government on April...

-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself.  China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive.  But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: In an urgent meeting convened on Saturday, city CBSE schools decided to send admission related details to the state education department by June 18 and reopen admissions for Std I two days after that. TOI had reported on Friday that almost all CBSE schools will start distributing admission forms from June 20 to meet provisions as mandated under the Right To Education (RTE). City principals were briefed...