Baltimore: Carolyn Stanley, a single mother with five children, receives $327 in food stamps each month to feed her family. With prices for staples like bread and cheese going ever higher, each month is harder than the last. She buys hot dogs over higher-quality meat and feeds her kids cereal, but even with other government support she often has to seek help from local churches and from friends. "The food runs out somewhere within the middle of the month, or getting close to the end,' said Stanley, 49. "It is not easy. I pray.'

Geneva: The United Nations said on Wednesday it had obtained permission to fly emergency supplies to cyclone-ravaged Myanmar but aid workers were stsill waiting for visas to enter the country.

Scientists have come up with a controversial theory which suggests that huge comet impacts wiped out North America's large mammals 13,000 years ago. According to a report in National Geographic News, the hypothesis proposes that an onslaught of extraterrestrial bodies caused the mass extinction known as the

A new model developed by scientists has suggested that the ancient catastrophe that led to the creation of the moon may have produced additional satellites that lingered in Earth's skies for tens of millions of years. According to a report in New Scientist, model suggests moonlets may have once occupied the two Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, regions in space where the gravitational tug of the Earth and the Moon exactly cancel each other out.

Astronomers have uncovered part of the missing matter in the universe, a discovery which they claim will help in understanding the evolution of the cosmic web in the future. Ten years ago, scientists predicted about half of the missing "ordinary' or normal matter made of atoms exists in the form of low density gas, filling vast spaces between galaxies. Now, an international team has discovered its hottest parts, using the European Space Agency's orbiting observatory.

It's a conflict of interest

In a recent opinion piece (

Politics mustn't come in the way of relief efforts in Myanmar

India is on a high alert against Enterovirus 71 (EV-71), a causative agent for hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) that has infected over 20,000 children and killed around 40 of them, in at least four Asian countries over the past three months. China, which has recorded over 15,799 cases of HFMD and 28 deaths, has been the worst affected, followed by Vietnam where 3,000 children have been infected and 10 died. Singapore too has recorded around 10,490 cases while Hong Kong recently isolated the virus from two children.

According to the latest global report card, India ranks 27th along with Ghana and Eritrea when it comes to providing basic healthcare to its children, which includes life-saving interventions like prenatal care, skilled childbirth, immunization and treatment for diarrhoea and pneumonia. Over 53% children in India under five years