-The United Nations   The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest, released today by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of...

-The United Nations   With the world population projected to reach 7 billion in five days’ time, actions taken now will decide whether the future will be healthy, sustainable and prosperous or marked by inequalities, environmental decline and economic setbacks, according to a United Nations report issued today. The world must seize the opportunity to invest in the health and education of its youth to reap the full benefits of future economic development...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...

One week from now, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date—the US Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March—but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding...

Close to one lakh children below the age of five years died of diarrhoea attributable to rotavirus infection in 2008, accounting for 22 per cent of the total deaths reported globally, reports the latest edition of the Lancet Infection Diseases magazine. Diarrhoea related with the rotavirus infection resulted in 453,000 deaths worldwide in 2008 among children younger than five years—37 per cent of deaths attributable to diarrhoea with five countries accounting...