Peter Capella
Guest Author
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/ 23 August 2007

WHO warns over possibility of new health threats

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Thursday warned that a new deadly infectious disease like Aids or Ebola is bound to appear in the 21st century, in a report urging more global solidarity. "It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like Aids, another Ebola," the 2007 <i>World Health Report</i> said.

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/ 11 March 2007

UN faces renewed test over Sudan

The United Nations Human Rights Council will open a three-week session on Monday with member states and top officials smarting from Sudan’s rebuffing a mission to assess the situation in strife-torn Darfur. The fledgling and divided assembly, which replaced the largely discredited commission in 2006, is struggling to build up its monitoring rules by a mid-year deadline.

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/ 7 March 2007

Which green fuel to choose?

A motorist’s trip to the filling station is likely to be a complex business soon if the green marketing promises at the Geneva Motor Show, which opens on Thursday, are anything to go by. Petrol, diesel and its bio versions; ethanol, either pure or in differing blends with petrol; possibly liquid hydrogen; and an electric socket are all candidate fuel sources.

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/ 5 February 2007

Global warming melting magic of Swiss Alps

Television images beamed around the globe from the World Economic Forum in late January showed Davos covered by a blanket of snow that also shrouded growing concern in this and other Swiss mountain resorts. The much-wanted powder came suddenly, in the space of a couple of days, ending an extremely mild first half of winter.

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/ 12 December 2006

Tutu hits out at Israel over blocked mission

South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Monday sharply criticised Israel’s failure to cooperate with a United Nations human rights fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Tutu confirmed that Israeli authorities had effectively thwarted the mission by failing to grant travel visas in time.

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/ 20 November 2006

WHO: Africa’s hopes hinge on health care

Africa will never climb out of poverty unless devastating health challenges such as a ”silent epidemic” of maternal and child death are tackled, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report released on Monday. Some of the biggest health problems Africans face are worsening despite attempts to reverse them, the African Regional Health report said.