The outcome of the historic climate change negotiations in Copenhagen hinges on the issues of emissions reductions and financing, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today as he urged world leaders to use the final days of the talks to strike an ambitious new agreement. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that to stave off the worst effects of climate change, industrialized countries must slash greenhouse...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from...

Global measles deaths have fallen by 78 per cent within the past decade, with vaccinations saving some 4.3 million lives, but the disease could make a deadly comeback if funding and political will are not sustained, a United Nations-backed study warned today. All regions except South-East Asia – where India alone, with its 1-billion strong population, accounted for three out of four measles deaths in 2008 – have achieved the UN...

A new United Nations-backed report calls on countries in the Pacific Ocean region to scale up their response to HIV and AIDS, which is being fuelled in the region by violence against women, stigma and unprotected sex. According to “Turning the tide: an OPEN strategy for a response to AIDS in the Pacific,” the first report published by the Commission on AIDS in the Pacific, an estimated 59,000 people were...