STWR - Share The World's Resources

Economic growth does not necessarily translate into improvements in child mortality, major new research suggests. Every year 10 million children still die before their fifth birthday, 99% of them in the developing world, according to Save the Children. A study comparing economic performance with child mortality reveals that some countries have not translated wealth into improvements across society.

I've startled a bug scientist. "Yeah, now I'm nervous," said Mike Hoffmann, a Cornell University entomologist and crop specialist who spends his days with cucumber beetles and small wasps. But he's also in charge of keeping the research funding flowing at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. What have I done to alarm him? I've drawn his attention to the newly released FY 2009 Presidential Budget.

Contamination hangs around depleted uranium (DU). The radioactive, toxic substance itself pulses with it – for billions of years. But everything else surrounding it seems contaminated, too – by half-truths, deceptions and downright ignorance. Shake the waters of the DU story and a miasmal murk rises that threatens to obscure everything. Between the official line that depleted uranium is not especially harmful and the conspiracist view that it is a genocidal weapon there is a crossfire that seems to ward off access to the truth.

By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s. 

This year's World AIDS Day sees health watchdogs battling against complacency, warning that AIDS still kills some 6,000 people each day even if the estimated toll of infections has fallen and life-saving drugs are being rolled out.

The pharmaceutical industry is denying medicines to millions of poor people and undermining its own future because companies are refusing to change the way they do business in developing country markets, according to a new report by international agency Oxfam.

Drive to improve sanitation is the key to educational and economic progress.