The win comes when they really needed to kick the United proper. The end of the season! They have never won the title for 44 years. Premier league is important for the teams in the UK

This is a sad day for the United fans who wanted to win. The City fans will have a parade tomorrow through Manchester streets.

We congratulate them for the win this year.

End

KATHMANDU,  – The Nepalese government has launched an ambitious plan to curb the spread of malaria in high-risk parts of the country, where some 3,000 people were infected last year.

“This programme aims to end malaria in Nepal and bring about significant change in how we battle the disease,” Nepal’s Minister of Health and Population, Rajendra Mahato, told IRIN. 

Nepal has run anti-malaria campaigns in the past, but Mahato said the latest effort was different, given the scope of the initiative and its goal of eradication. “We are not just monitoring and reacting, we are acting before any outbreak happens,” he said. 

The programme began on 1 May, and is the first nationwide push to end malaria. The central government aims to deliver anti-malarial drugs free of charge to some 500,000 people in 31 districts, including 13 southern Terai districts, the area most prone to the disease. 

The health ministry will distribute the drugs at their local offices, and through their representatives in rural areas.

Nepal is still considered one of the most malaria-prone countries in Asia, even though the ministry is using a 1994 study, which showed that 20 million of the country’s 30 million people were at risk.

More than half of the country finds obtaining medical attention for malaria difficult due to poor infrastructure, and at times the government also has done little to prevent the disease from spreading. Observers hope the new campaign is an indication that the country’s mindset and approach to health could be changing.

“We are working hard at reaching our goal of reducing the number of people that face malaria annually, by half this year,” said Prijita Kunat a ministry official working on the programme, who added that the government will also focus on developing water and sanitation systems in the impoverished areas of Terai. 

One of the main supporters of the new programme is G D Thakur, the director of the Epidemiology and Disease Control Division (EDCD) of the Department of Health Services, who said that although the mosquito-borne disease has not caused deaths in the country since 2009, there is no room for complacency.

“The new programme is a great chance for Nepal to reduce malaria… and if we can be proactive on this front, Nepal can be a malaria-free country in just a few years,” Thakur said. 

Eight people died of malaria in 2008, and six in 2009, but no deaths were reported among the few thousand cases in the past two years, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. There were about 216 million malaria cases globally in 2010, with an estimated 655,000 deaths.

“It is exciting to see the government and the health sector taking this issue seriously after many years of neglect, and we are watching to see how the implementation takes off,” Thakur said. “If successful, Nepalis could be facing a future that has them worrying about other things.” 

jm/ds/he source www.irinnews.org

Photo: Jason Gutierrez/IRIN

Are development goals heading in the right direction?

LONDON, – Twelve years gone, and three years still to go: as the Millennium Development Goals’ (MDG) target date of 2015 gets closer, the debate is intensifying about what went right and what went wrong, and – perhaps more importantly – what kind of goals should be set for the future.
 
Some of the arguments were aired by an expert panel convened at Britain’s Institute of Development Studies (IDS) on 3 May. The Institute has just published a paper entitled Human Security and the Next Generation of Comprehensive Human Development Goals, which makes the case for adopting targets that are “more explicitly rights-based and participatory”, would focus more on equity and sustainability, and “insist on the centrality of employment and decent work”.
 
Gabriele Koehler, one of the authors, outlined an ambitious wish list for the next set of goals, integrating the much broader idea of “human security”. It would incorporate everything covered by the existing MDGs, and “we also have a much, much deeper attention to wealth and income inequalities, to social exclusion, to environmental goals… good governance is an important element… because one has to look at… governance [in] the states that we are expecting to deliver the public goods.”
 
Koehler would like to see the new goals being applied globally, not just to developing countries, since every country has pockets of poverty and exclusion, and she wants everyone – governments and the governed – to talk much more in terms of rights.
 
All this would make the new MDGs far more political than the current ones, which concentrate on uncontroversial goods, like safe motherhood and child survival, and do not open up the prospect of a government being sued if it cannot ensure a decent job and a safe environment.
 
But some governments are going down the road of social protection. India, for instance, has adopted the idea of a ‘right to demand work’, so state governments have to respond with an offer of one hundred days of paid employment per household, while Brazil recognises the right of citizens to a minimum standard of living.
 
Also on the panel was Romulo Paes de Sousa, until recently Brazil’s deputy minister of social development. He accepted that framing social goods in terms of rights was controversial, but argued that Brazil’s experience showed it was possible to change perceptions. “When I started to work with social protection in 2004, it was a big problem in Brazil and many countries,” he said.
 
“They think that social protection produces laziness and things like that. But it has changed. We still have that debate, but it showed that it is possible to change the perception that the public has of social programmes.”
 
There were calls for some of the existing goals – which are dominated by health and education, and where some targets have not been met – to be rolled over. But if the new agenda is to be wider, then some sectors may receive less attention in future
 
“The current, more health-focused MDGs have driven significant progress and investment in health globally,” Olga Golichenko of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance told IRIN. “The Alliance is concerned that the current health goals would be watered down to weak statements on health. We would like to see improved health outcomes of the poorest and most marginalized communities globally, through the provision of universal coverage and by implementing a rights-based approach. Those MDGs which are not achieved should not be dropped, and we need to build on the momentum and progress that has been achieved to date.”

Get involved
 
In the audience at IDS was Richard Carey of the Donors’ Assistance Committee (DAC), one of the architects of the Millennium Goals in 2000. “Someone somewhere has to write the first word, and it could be you,” he said, urging everyone to get involved in the debate.
 

Busan was a milestone in defining how a more diverse set of actors might agree on some of the nuts and bolts of delivering more effective development assistance

He described how the MDGs were put together, building on commitments made in previous UN agreements, and suggested that the Busan agreement for Engagement in Fragile States, with its commitments to inclusive political settlements and the need to address injustices, could now provide a precedent for the acceptance of a human rights and political equity agenda.
 
At the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea’s second city, over 80 governments and international organizations agreed on a set of peace-building and state-building goals that establish a new approach to engaging with fragile states. More than 1.5 billion people are caught in cycles of poverty and violence.
 
Paul Wafer, who is working on post-2015 development goals for Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), was more doubtful about whether the Busan participants really had committed to a more political agenda, but said the process could point the way forward.
 
“Busan was a milestone in defining how a more diverse set of actors might agree on some of the nuts and bolts of delivering more effective development assistance. The process in Busan was interesting, in that it used a series of building blocks, creating coalitions of the willing around particular issues, and that could show a possible way forward for creating the successors to the MDGs,” he told IRIN.
 
The time is short. Amy Pollard of the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD), who co-chairs the ‘Beyond 2015’ campaign, said the thousand days remaining were nothing, but at the same time warned that three years is a long time in politics. “It’s prudent to attempt to take the temperature of the political context globally, and what that might mean, [but] the context in which the post-MDGs will be negotiated doesn’t exist yet,” she noted.
 
“It’s 2012, and we are looking something that is going to happen as an inter-governmental process over perhaps 12 months in 2015-2016. And if there were to be a major world event, of the scale of 9/11, then that would be a game changer in terms of what might be possible.”
 
eb/oa/he
source www.irinnews.org

Norway has signed a new MoU on cooperation with Ethiopia, which is increasing steadily.

Norway’s Minister of International Development Heikki Holmås and Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Hailemariam Desalegn signed the MoU during Mr Holmås’s visit to Ethiopia this week.

Mr Holmås commented, “Ethiopia has chosen a path of green development that is lifting people out of poverty. Given that it is one of the world’s poorest countries, its plans are impressive. The new MoU creates a good departure point for helping to improve the human rights situation in Ethiopia.”

The MoU covers all aspects of the close development cooperation between Ethiopia and Norway. Ethiopia is witnessing rapid development. It is playing a leading role in the African fight against climate change. It also has a key role in the efforts to bring about peace between Sudan and South Sudan and in Somalia. However, there are aspects of the human rights situation in the country that give grounds for criticism. The new MoU will enable Norway to step up its dialogue on these types of issues in a more systematic manner.

“I’m glad that I decided to travel to Africa for my first visit as minister. This has given me new insight into important issues. For me it has been crucial to be able to talk to people working with human rights and members of the opposition in addition to my talks with key representatives of the authorities. It would have been difficult to gain these insights without coming here,” said Mr Holmås.

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