News stories by Kanya D'Almeida, page 6

As the savage crackdown on the majority Shiite opposition movement drags on in Bahrain, King Hamad bin Issa Al Khalifa's military regime — backed by the hefty armed forces of Sunni- dominated Saudi Arabia — has moved from launching outright assaults on peaceful protestors on the streets of Manama in broad daylight into the murky waters of what experts are calling state terror, featuring all the old tactics of petrifying a population into submission.

By the time the reader gets to the end of this paragraph, an African child, likely under five years old, will have died from malaria.

As weeks of what the International Monetary Fund's managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn called 'painful' negotiations over a host of macroeconomic policies drew to a close here Saturday, confusion over coherent strategies for sustainable economic recovery hangs thick in the air.

The first weeks of April have witnessed a maelstrom of multilateralism — from the chambers of the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) here to the round tables of the BRICS summit in the resort island of the Hainan province in China — leaving in its wake a tome of unanswered questions regarding the contours and configurations of the new world order.

While the curtain was being raised Tuesday on a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiative to pour one billion dollars of federal funding into the Partnerships for Patients Act — a new project designed to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars — the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) held a media briefing here simultaneously presenting studies from their theme issue on 'Infectious Diseases and Immunology'.

With over 1.5 billion people living in countries blighted by incessant or recurring violence, the World Bank's annual World Development Report (WDR), with this year's focus on how conflict derails development, was anxiously received Monday by scores of development agencies, governments and NGOs all over the world.

With hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in destitution as the country flounders under political, economic and climate wreckage, critics say celebrations of the inevitable profits of disaster capitalism have already begun between the right- wing President-elect Michel Martelly and his neoliberal allies in Washington.

Just days after United States President Barak Obama announced his reelection campaign for the 2012 run-off via a Youtube video, the White House is poised on the brink of its first shutdown in 15 years, with budget wars, an immigration maelstrom and determined opposition to the administration's seeming tolerance for union-busting barricading the path to a second term for the Democrat incumbent.

Though the World Health Organization (WHO) has focused this year's World Health Day Apr. 7 on prioritising the struggle against the global spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), scores of international researchers and scientists fear this decision is coming too late, with 2011 already shadowed by the failure of pharmaceutical antibiotics to curb the proliferation of diseases.

In a rare and timely collaboration, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) teamed up with the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to produce a report on the urgent need for developing nations to pour effort and resources into their so-called creative economies.