Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people--more than 80 percent of the world's population--have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world's poorest countries.

This new report by WFP details impact of climate change on hunger in developing countries. Predicts that by 2050 the number of people at risk of hunger as a result of climate change is expected to increase by 10 to 20 percent more than would be expected without climate change.

India has been named among the top 10 Asian countries that are paying an increasing importance towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure norms, a survey says.

According to social enterprise CSR Asia

Tigers are symbols of all that is powerful, mystical, and beautiful in nature. But wild tigers are in crisis, having fallen in numbers from about 100,000 in 1900 to just 3,200 today as a result of adverse human activities, including habitat destruction and a huge illegal trade in tiger parts. The decline continues to this day.

PRAKASH CHAWLA
CHA-AM HUA HIN

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Sunday said India was committed to the success of international efforts to combat climate change and sought a global mechanism to develop environmentfriendly technologies and ensuring their availability to developing nations at an affordable cost.

What do periods of weak low-latitude rainfall have to do with the
meltdown of great ice sheets? Cheng et al. show that this counterintuitive association contains a hot clue about
the much-debated causes of the ice age cycles that end every 100,000
years or so in a collapse of the great Northern Hemisphere ice sheets
(a glacial termination).

230Th-dated oxygen isotope records of stalagmites from SanbaoCave, China, characterize Asian Monsoon (AM) precipitation throughthe ends of the third- and fourthmost recent ice ages.

The powerful earthquake that struck off the west coast of Sumatra on September 30th, killing many hundreds of people and trapping thousands more under rubble, was not the giant seismologists had feared. But its impact was still horrendous to behold, and came after a few days when nature had wreaked havoc across Asia.

It has been a terrible period for countries in the Asia-Pacific region, with natural calamities of one kind or another bringing death and destruction to their lands. On September 26, Typhoon Ketsana ploughed through the Philippines before tearing into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

The powerful earthquake that struck off the west coast of Sumatra on September 30th, killing many hundreds of people and trapping thousands more under rubble, was not the giant seismologists had feared. But its impact was still horrendous to behold, and came after a few days when nature had wreaked havoc across Asia.

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