HYDERABAD: It may still be a long way for Andhra Pradesh to achieve its population stabilisation goal, but it has the satisfaction of standing first in the country in conducting family planning operations during 2007-08.

The world's population will reach 7 billion in 2012, even as the global community struggles to satisfy its appetite for natural resources, according to a new US government projection. There are 6.7 billion people in the world today. The United States ranks third, with 304 million, behind China and India, according to projections released by the US Census Bureau. Sri Lanka is ranked 53 this year with a population of 21,128,773 The world's population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.

Sukhdev Singh, 30, a contract labourer from village Kharakha in Sikar district in rural Haryana was desperate to get married. His parents, Hasan Ram and Ranu Bai, had tried to find a match for him but after seven fruitless years they finally gave up. The reason for the shortage of brides lies in Haryana's sex ratio which is acutely skewed with 861 females for every thousand males. In other words, out of every hundred males, 14 would be unable to find a bride. The brunt of this problem is felt the most by poor, rural males.

The Pune Municipal Corporation has confirmed that there has been an increase of 30 girls being registered at birth per 1,000 boys over the last five years. This reverses the downward slide of girls born per 1,000 boys as the number had dipped to 841 in 2002, making it a skewed sex ratio for the city.

Investing in agriculture in Africa to solve food shortages is more important than just reacting to the continent's present food crisis, according to the leader of a U.N. food aid organization. "The real underlying problem is a long-term one; productivity growth in agriculture is going down," International Fund for Agricultural Development President Lennart Bage said in a Thursday interview with The Japan Times.

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impacts in the United States from human-caused global warming. The report is online at climatescience.gov, along with a new report updating the administration's priorities for climate research.

Mianzhu: Chinese soldiers were working non-stop to dig a giant sluice to ease pressure on a swelling "quake lake', with plans to evacuate 100,000 people to avert a new disaster, state media said. China on Tuesday put the death toll from the earthquake that struck Sichuan province on May 12 at 67,183, with the figure certain to rise with 20,790 listed as missing. Nearly 362,000 people were injured.

It is shocking but true that about half of the city's population has been drinking water having faecal contents, and even those living in the so-called posh areas are not exempted. According to the Institute of Public Health, waste discharged from bowels (faeces) has been found in about half of the drinking water samples collected from almost all parts of Lahore. The samples tested by the institute were sent to it by different agencies including the city district government during the first two weeks of the month.