News stories by Manipadma Jena, page 4

NAIROBI/NEW DELHI, Dec 01 (IPS) - "Political resolve is the key for succeeding in our fight against oceans pollution," Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment, who is leading hands-on the organisation's global campaign to clean up seas and oceans of plastic litter, agricultural run‑off and chemical dumping, told IPS.

NEW DELHI, India, Sep 25 (IPS) - Rapid urbanization is increasingly shifting the impacts of malnutrition from rural to urban areas. One in three stunted under-five children out of 155 million across the world now lives in cities and towns.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Sep 07 (IPS) - Dauntlessly crusading against curbs on freedom of speech, fifty-five-year-old Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh was gunned down at her very doorstep in Bengaluru city on the evening of Sep. 5, taking three bullets of the seven fired in her lungs and heart. She was shot from just three feet away.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Aug 07 (IPS) - "Showing them a picture-book crow, I intone ‘kaak' in Bengali, the State language. While others repeat in chorus, the tribal Santhali first-graders respond with a blank look. They know the crow only as ‘koyo'. They'll happily roll out glass marbles to count but ask them how many they counted, they remain silent because in their mother tongue, one is mit, two is bariah - very different sounding from the Bengali ek and du."

NEW DELHI, Jun 12 (IPS) - In Meghalaya, India's northeastern biodiversity hotspot, all three major tribes are matrilineal. Children take the mother's family name, while daughters inherit the family lands.

NEW DELHI, May 01 (IPS) - "It's not what you say that prompts it—it's the fact that you are saying it," says Mary Beard, a Cambridge University classics professor about online trolling. "If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is the many ways that men have silenced outspoken women since the days of the ancients."

NEW DELHI, Mar 21 (IPS) - In Asia, it likely will not be straightforward water wars.

NEW DELHI, Feb 16 (IPS) - Jaipal Hembrum runs three one-man home enterprises - a bicycle repair shop, a tiny food stall and a tailoring unit in Kautuka, a remote village in eastern India. Sewing recycled clothes into mattresses late into the evening, the 38-year-old father of three girls says two light bulbs fed by a solar power system have changed his life.

NEW DELHI, Dec 13 (IPS) - Tasura Begum straightens up from picking a bushel of green chilis and looks at the mighty Padma River flowing by, wondering whose life it ruined today.

NEW DELHI/BONN, Oct 18 (IPS) - One of the critical challenges facing the world today is that emerging migration patterns that are increasingly rooted in the depletion of natural resources.