A new 10-year blueprint for assisting the poorest countries on the planet to join the league of the more fortunate ones was approved Friday at the closing of the Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) held May 9- 13 here. The Istanbul Programme for Action, a 50-page plan negotiated for a week by heads of state and diplomats from both least developed and economically developed states, contemplates the...

The cheapest car in the world proved the costliest for a 34-year-old Left Front CPI-M government in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as the communists lost the elections here by a wide margin. The outcome is the result of an anti-left movement that began in 2006 following the controversial takeover of farmland to create a manufacturing plant for Tata Motors’ small family vehicle called the ‘Nano’. A sweep by a regional...

An annual meeting of Asian finance ministers and central bank governors in Hanoi is set to address the fate of 64 million people in the region on the brink of extreme poverty. They are the worst affected by soaring food prices, which have hit record highs in the first two months of this year. "The issue of food price inflation and food security will indeed be one of the key topics...

The United Nations is predicting that come Oct. 31, the world population will hit the seven billion mark - and keep expanding till it reaches 9.3 billion by the year 2050. Much of this increase, according to the Population Division of the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), is projected to come from 58 high-fertility countries: 39 in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin...

The head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that the “slow-motion catastrophe” of non-communicable diseases could overwhelm even the wealthiest nations if the root causes of the epidemic, mostly lifestyle decisions, are not addressed. Margaret Chan, the WHO Director-General, told delegates at the First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Noncommunicable Disease Control in Moscow that the fact the many of the chronic non-communicable illnesses in...