Diagnosing multi drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) will now take just two days' time. In a major announcement on Monday, the World Health Organisation decided to make widely available a path-breaking rapid molecular diagnostic tool that will generate TB test results in two days flat. Currently, standard tests take up to three months. This is why only 2% of MDR-TB cases worldwide are being diagnosed and treated appropriately.

Pramugdha Mamgain NEW DELHI MAHARASHTRA Seamless (MSL), the flagship company of the Rs 3,000-crore DP Jindal Group, is in the race to acquire an Indonesiabased iron ore mining firm for around Rs 300 crore. It is learnt that Indonesian firm has iron ore reserves of close to 20 million tonnes. If the deal goes through, MSL would also establish a 1 million tonne steel plant close to the iron ore deposits in Indonesia with investments of up to Rs 1,200 crore.

Hazards of old mobile handsets under the spotlight at United Nations meet NUSA DUA: The disposal oi massive numbers of unwanted mobile phones will be a key focus of a five-day meeting on waste management which started on Monday here in Indonesia. The fate of the more than three billion of the gadgets in use today will be discussed by more than 1,000 delegates from 170 countries at the meeting on the Basel Convention in Bali.

The disposal of massive numbers of unwanted mobile phones will be a key focus of a five-day meeting on waste management which started Monday in Indonesia, organisers said.

Jeddah: Two days after inflation figures threw up a 13-year high of 11.05%, largely attributed to the hike in fuel prices, finance minister P Chidambaram cautioned oil producers that they would also suffer in case the global economy slows down or slips into recession due to high oil prices. India, he said, had passed on barely 9% of the required price increase to customers three weeks ago and the result was that inflation crossed 11%. Even oil producing countries like Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela face double digit inflation up to 29.3%.

The time has come to act fast to replace, over a reasonable period of time, our dependence on imported crude oil. M. PERIASAMY Jatropha, a plant that can be used to produce bio-diesel, is cultivated on the Karunya University campus in Coimbatore. A file picture.

Plasmodium vivax, a strain of malaria thought to be mild and non-life-threatening is potentially fatal, according to a new study. Two malaria strains, P. vivax and P. falciparum, affect humans. The latter, the dominant strain in Africa, is considered to be more virulent and deadlier. But P. vivax accounts for 400 million cases every year in Asia, with about 300 cases reported annually in patients returning to Australia from malaria endemic countries. In Indonesia, the parasite has developed resistance to standard treatments.

Thwarts Bid To Put Onus On Developing Nations India may have won the first round at Bali in December 2007 but the UN meeting on climate change at Bonn from June 2-13 saw the developed countries try to alter the Bali agenda. India, along with the G-77 grouping, had to fight hard in the subsidiary meeting to defend the Bali roadmap.

For a beleaguered UPA government, increasingly under fire from the Left and the Opposition over galloping inflation, the sharp rise in global crude oil prices couldn't have come at a more inopportune time.

A deal to be done between rich and poor countries on global warming is going begging