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The scandals affecting the IPL were a sign that India is unable to hold a major sporting event without the organizers being tainted by corruption. Now, the Commonwealth Games fiasco has shown on an even bigger scale how difficult it is for those in charge to escape the stigma of sleaze.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide loan assistance to the Republic of the Marshall Islands to help to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the public sector.

DAR ES SALAAM - In a bold effort to save one of the world's rarest amphibians from extinction, one hundred Kihansi spray toads (KST) have been flown home to Tanzania after being painstakingly reared at the Bronx Zoo and The Toledo Zoo working in close partnership with the Tanzanian government and the World Bank.

New York: Efforts to promote direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are nearing a turning point, a senior United Nations official said today, underlining that success hinges on continued regional and international support.

New York: The United Nations today unveiled a decade-long push to raise awareness and mobilize action to fight desertification, which threatens the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in 100 countries.

With 16 months left for the Punjab Assembly elections, Punjab's political scenario is undergoing two significant changers. First is the launching of intensive efforts by the Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his Deputy Chief Minister son Sukhbir Singh Badal to erase the widely prevalent impression about the Akali-BJP government's being non-performer and misgoverned. Second is that the deeply divided state Congress leaders have virtually stopped publicly squabbling, obviously on the party high command's diktat, though the party continues to be in hibernation.

NEW DELHI: The sharp exchanges between the ruling BJP and the Opposition Congress in the Karnataka Assembly, thankfully, brought into the national focus the illegal mining and export of millions of tonnes of iron ore and the involvement of the State BJP Cabinet Ministers in this mining game. More importantly, it also focused on the role of the mining mafia in iron ore mining, the mega-profits earned by them at the cost of state revenues and so on.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is extending a $122 million grant to expand and modernize Tajikistan's electricity transmission system, which will help it boost energy trading with neighboring countries to meet winter shortages.

One of the most urgent and vexing problems in the developing world, more so in India, is how to finance and provide health care for more than a billion persons, most of whom are impoverished or belong to low income group. In most Asian countries, health care is financed by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments by individuals. These expenditures result in jeopardizing an equitable health system in developing countries. In the absence of financial risk pooling, the poor have to meet the costs of health care from their own pocket, pushing them further down the abyss.

When the UPA government won the trial of strength on July 22, 2008, after the Left deserted the alliance, prime minister Manmohan Singh had famously said: 'I am liberated.' Ten months later the main ruling party had further humbled his former tormentors by winning the 2009 elections with impressive gains. The PM's personal triumph was so stunning that many of those parties that had contested against the UPA unilaterally announced their support to the UPA. This had made a confident PM to boldly setting forth his government's policies. This was the time when the UPA's PM seemed acting as a prime minister.