-The United Nations   A new United Nations report warns that ASIan nations are at risk of electoral violence, driven by real and perceived fraud and corruption, and stresses the need for strong oversight and other measures to strengthen election credibility. In “Understanding Electoral Violence in ASIa,” the UN Development Programme (UNDP) studies electoral processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand, drawing lessons and making recommendations to reduce the...

A recent ILO report focusses on the discrimination in employment opportunities and remuneration and wants governments to act. IN recent years, one of the predominant concerns of international organisations, especially those that have a “rights” perspective, has been the impact of the global downturn on various vulnerable sections across the world. Notwithstanding the fact that many countries have signed and ratified conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and are...

-Reuters   Clad in white home-spun garments and living in a spartan room of his village's Hindu temple, Anna Hazare is an unlikely thorn in the side of the government hundreds of miles away in New Delhi. And yet for millions of Indians, he is a 21st-century Mahatma Gandhi, inspiring a rare wave of protests against the spiralling corruption that has tarnished the up-and-coming image of ASIa's third-largest economy. Like Gandhi, who led India's...

More than one billion people will not get the bASIc sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to bASIc sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...

-The United Nations   The United Nations today declared that the world has completely eradicated a cattle disease that has killed millions of bovines for millennia. It is the first animal disease to be officially declared eradicated – and only the second disease ever, after smallpox. A resolution approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at its meeting in Rome today stated that the world was free of rinderpest, or...