Illegal fishing is depleting the seas and robbing poor nations in Africa and Asia of resources, but a lack of global cooperation is undermining efforts to track rogue vessels, an environmental group said on Tuesday.

As global populations and food prices rise and environmental degradation intensifies, transnational corporations and some governments are buying up vast tracts of farmland where it is still available

World Health Organisation (WHO) warned Bangladesh and other South East Asian countries about the pneumonic plague that had recently hit China.

As it is a public health emergency of international concern and China is not far from Bangladesh, WHO warned Bangladesh to take cautionary steps to control the spread of pneumonic plague, said the government officials.

The Food and Agriculture Organi-sation (FAO) of the United Nations has put Bangladesh on a list of 31 countries that are in substantial need of food assistance in 2009.

Most of the food-insecure least developed countries (LDCs) are in Africa, while five are in Asia, and one is Caribbean.

health The Wnt pathway Scientists zeroed in on the gene responsible for multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body

IBM is pushing ahead into providing technology services to manage water, a market $10 billion market that the company sees growing quickly.

"This to me is an area that's really going to explode in the next three to five years," said Sharon Nunes, who heads IBM's Big Green Innovations initiative. "People see it as a gap. The water market is transforming."