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New York: Afghan opium production has decreased by almost 50 per cent this year, the United Nations said in a new report released today, while cautioning that rising prices on the global market may induce farmers to cultivate more of the lucrative crop.

New York: Prospects for job opportunities have worsened in many countries despite evidence that the global economy is growing again in the wake of the recession, and labour markets are likely to remain depressed until 2015, the United Nations labour agency said in a report unveiled today.

New York: Innovations in clean energy technologies are concentrated in six countries - Japan, the United States, Germany, the Republic of Korea (ROK), France and the United Kingdom - according to a new United Nations-backed study.

New York: All countries must protect the human rights of the tens of millions of migrants worldwide who lack proper legal status and are thus more likely to face abuse, prolonged detention and ill-treatment, enslavement, rape or even murder, a United Nations-backed group warned today.

The G-20 meeting at Gyeongju, the unusually fierce campaign for mid-term polls in US and Barack Obama's visit to India and other places — all bear one unmistakable common strain. They reverberate the growing crisis of the modern capitalist system. Initially we were led to believe that the US had only a 'meltdown' caused by the sub-prime problem, and a brief stimulus would put things back on the track. Then it spread and burst into a full-blown global economic collapse.

The economy is on steady growth at 8 to 9 per cent in 2010-11, revenues are buoyant, and there are signs of headline inflation moderating to provide comfort for Government though by now it has all but admitted its inability to tackle high food prices, which have thus far been left to Nature and Market. In any case, the risk of food inflation getting transmitted to general prices does not seem as dominant as it was in the first half of the fiscal year. RBI measures have had some effect on moderating core inflation.

Americans, befuddled and frustrated over the economic blight that has overtaken the country, are widely assumed to favour Republicans sufficiently to enable them take control of the 435-member House of Representatives, in perhaps the toughest midterm elections, on November 2. For weeks, opinion polls have been pointing to a growing surge toward a Republican win, ending the four-year run of Democrats, currently holding a majority of 255 to 177.

If all that glitters is not gold, then all that shines black is also not coal. Ask successive chairmen of the public sector behemoth, Coal India Limited (CIL), the world's largest coal company, about the authenticity of much of CIL's pithead stocks, the value of which bolsters the company's annual income in its balance sheet, you may come to know that not all of them are coal. They are shells or black stones. The valuation of pithead stocks helped CIL and its subsidiaries window-dress the annual accounts for years. Whenever CIL had change of guards at the top, the veracity of pithead stock reports was questioned by the new chairman.

KOLKATA: State Assembly elections in Assam are expected to be held early next year. As political parties are probing the possibility of new permutations and combinations, certain issues are coming to the fore. These are likely to occupy centrestage by the time the polls are announced.

LUCKNOW: The renomination of Mrs. Rita Bahuguna as Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president has made it clear that the party high command is quite serious about Mission 2012.