-The Economic Times   Pushed to the wall by an overly cautious drug regulator and an alarmist Indian government, clinical trial companies are looking at South East Asian countries to expand their business and escape the red tape of Indian authorities.  Clinical research companies (CROs), that were aspiring to become billion- dollar companies by 2010, had to rework their plans after a Parliamentary Standing Committee report questioned the allegedly unfair and unethical trials...

-The United Nations On the occasion of World Day Against Child Labour, two United Nations independent human rights experts today highlighted that of the 215 million children working throughout the world, more than half are subjected to the worst forms of child labour, including sexual and labour exploitation. “One of the most abhorrent forms of child slavery is found in mining and quarrying, where children start work from the age of three,”...

India is listed among the top five countries across the world which lose a majority of the two million children worldwide who die each year to easily preventable diseases -- pneumonia and diarrhoea &NDAsh; states the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report released on Friday. The report adds that nearly 90 per cent of all these deaths are due to unsafe water and poor hygiene. “Pneumonia and diarrhoea are among the...

-The Guardian  Governments spend years negotiating environmental agreements, but then willfully ignore them &NDAsh; it's a dismal record It's global agreement time again. In two weeks, 120 world leaders and 190-odd countries will go to the Rio+20 Earth summit and &NDAsh; unless the talks collapse &NDAsh; sign up to new international goals, pledges, targets, protocols and treaties, and promise to commit to sustainable development, protect the earth and use resources more wisely....

Union Cabinet approves negotiating brief   India will head to the Rio+20 summit in Brazil with a negotiating brief focussed on defending the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR) and preventing any attempt to pin down specific goals or targets regarding sustainable development. On Thursday, the Union Cabinet approved the strategy to be followed by Indian negotiators at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly known as Rio+20 due to the...