The aftershock of the global financial crisis threatens to deprive millions of children in the world’s poorest countries of an education, the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report warns. With 72 million children still out of school, a combination of slower economic growth, rising poverty and budget pressures could erode the gains of the past decade. “While rich countries nurture their economic recovery, many poor countries face the imminent prospect...

Despite progress on many fronts to improve global health, the world still faces persistent challenges, from insufficient funding and capacity to the resistance by many to make needed lifestyle changes, the head of the United Nations health agency warned today. “Persuading people to adopt healthy behaviours is one of the biggest challenges in public health,” UN World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan told the agency’s Executive Board at the...

The government on Monday said its contention that there was no immediate and serious threat to the Himalayan glaciers was vindicated with the latest evidence suggesting that the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim on the glaciers disappearing by 2035 due to climate change, was not based on scientific evidence. Contested issue In 1999, glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain claimed that if the current pace of global warming continued unabated,...

Indian geologists who had two months ago accused a UN climate science agency of misleading the world with alarmist predictions about Himalayan glaciers have now said they stand vindicated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has launched an exercise to find out how its fourth assessment report issued nearly three years ago contained a prediction that most of the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. “We’re looking into it. We’re...

BHUBANESWAR: Widespread protests marked the visit of Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, to a national consultation on commercialisation of Bt brinjal. In a novel method of registering their resentment to attempts to allow commercial production of Bt brinjal in the country, hundreds of women under the banner of Orissa Nari Samaj (ONS) took out a funeral procession of Bt brinjal. They set a model of Bt...