On the completion of two decades of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the global community is nowhere close to making this world a better, safer and healthier place for its children. The biggest challenges continue to be in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa where primary health care, education and protection from poverty, diseases, exploitation and abuse are still big problems. In the area of under five mortality ratings,...

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...

Twenty-five years have passed since that night of terror and death in Bhopal, which saw a cloud of deadly gases explode out of a faulty tank in a pesticide factory and silently spread into the homes of sleeping people. Although no official count of casualties has ever been done, estimates based on hospital and rehabilitation records show that about 20,000 people died and about 5.7 lakh suffered bodily damage, making...

High levels of toxic chemicals are still found in Bhopal's drinking water, a new report published ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, said. Residents in the areas surveyed have high rates of birth defects, rapidly rising cancer rates, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness, it said. The report also questions the reliability of the tests carried out in at the AES Laboratories in New Delhi. The...

The Anderson saga is one more reminder that the powerful can always count on official help.  In the fall of 2002, Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harell paid a surprise visit to the New York State private estate of Warren Anderson, and found him living a “life of luxury”. Nothing odd about the discovery except that in the eyes of the law Mr. Anderson was untraceable, and had been so since 1992...