-The United Nations   The United Nations is set to launch an all-out attack next week on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), bringing together dozens of heads of State to promote the lifestyle changes needed to curb the soaring toll of a scourge that already causes over 63 per cent of all the world’s deaths. The high level General Assembly meeting, held at the start of its annual General Debate on Monday and Tuesday, is...

-Xinhua   Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory conditions, and other chronic diseases increASIngly threaten the health and economic security of many lower and middle-income countries, the World Bank warned on Thursday in a report. The World Bank cautioned that the rise of chronic diseases, especially among young working adults in these countries, was a danger that warranted immediate global attention. According to the report entitled “The Growing Danger of Non- Communicable Diseases (NCDs):...

“It is only the legislature which can abolish the death penalty and not the courts. As long as the death penalty exists in the statute book, it has to be imposed in some cases, otherwise it will tantamount to repeal of the death penalty by the judiciary,” the Supreme Court said on Tuesday while confirming the death sentence on an accused for burning to death his wife and three children. A...

-DPA   Cases of tuberculosis (TB) resistant to a multitude of drug treatments are rising “at an alarming rate” across Europe, with an estimated 81,000 new cases every year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report published Wednesday. Fifteen of the 27 countries with the highest incidence of multidrug-resistant TB are in eastern Europe, but ASIa has also been hit hard by the disease. Almost 12 per cent of newly diagnosed patients...

-PTI   One in six Americans are now living below poverty line, the Census Bureau said in a report, reflecting the adverse impact of economic crisis on common man. “The nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 per cent, up from 14.3 per cent in 2009 — the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate,” Census Bureau said in its report. “There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from...