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New York: An independent United Nations human rights expert today welcomed the decision by Myanmar’s President to grant amnesty and release a significant number of detainees and urged the Government to free the remaining political prisoners.

New York: More than 550,000 children in some of the most vulnerable districts of Iraq will benefit from a United Nations-backed school feeding programme that seeks not only to improve their nutrition but also to encourage poor families to send their children to school in the first place.

New Delhi: The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has found child labourers rampant in the Bt cotton fields of Shihori and Khimana in Banaskantha district in Gujarat.

New York: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is helping farmers in eastern Kenya make the necessary investments today to withstand drought and prevent food security crises tomorrow.

New York: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today stressed that disaster risk reduction should be a daily concern for everyone, noting that vulnerability to catastrophes is growing faster than the world’s capacity to strengthen resilience, as evidenced by the devastation wrought by the recent series of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts.

New York: The President of the General Assembly today urged the world to dispel entrenched myths about immigration and focus on migrants’ contributions to economic development in countries of origin, transit and destination.

New Delhi: The India is slated to raise the issue of exchange of information among the countries concerned to fight against the menace of black money and terror financing. The Indian Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday left for a three-day visit to Paris to attend G-20 Finance Ministers’ and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting.

New Delhi: The mock tsunami drill, i.e. Exercise IOWave11, was successfully concluded yesterday evening. The exercise was carried between 06 30 Hrs to 18 30 Hrs IST yesterday which re-enacted the events of December 26, 2004, with a 9.2 magnitude earthquake off Northern Sumatra. During the drill, Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC), based out of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) of the Ministry of Earth Sciences generated and disseminated 15 tsunami bulletins to both its National and Regional Contacts.

Fears about the spillovers from global growth amid still high inflation pressures in much of the region mean that policymakers in Asia face a delicate balancing act, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its latest Regional Economic Outlook (REO) for Asia and the Pacific, which was released in Asia today.

TOKYO: Low and middle-income countries in East Asia need to make their higher education systems more responsive to labor market demands and the economy as a whole to climb up the income ladder, says a new World Bank East Asia and Pacific Regional Report released today.