Source : Reuters / 03 Mar 2014

More than 700 people died in violence in Iraq in February, not including nearly 300 reported deaths in western Anbar province, where security forces have been battling Sunni Muslim rebels since January, the United Nations said on Saturday.

The world body said local authorities had recorded 298 civilian deaths in Anbar, but that it could not confirm the figures independently due to the chaos in the desert region.

Source : RT / 30 Jan 2014

A recent research estimates over 10,000 under-18s were shot in the US in 2009 - at least one third died. While infants are mostly injured due to firearms mishaps, teenagers are most often victims of criminal armed assaults.

A study by John Leventhal MD and his team from the Yale School of Medicine, published in the journal Pediatrics, utilizes statistics from the Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID), on children hospitalized in the US with gunshots in 2009, the latest statistics available.

Source : World Bulletin / 13 Dec 2013

The global death toll from cancer rose to 8.2 million in 2012 with sharp rises in breast cancer as the disease tightened its grip in developing nations struggling to treat an illness driven by Western lifestyles.

Cancer deaths were up 8 percent from 7.6 million in a previous survey in 2008 and breast cancer killed 522,000 women last year, up 14 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

Source : Reuters / 20 Nov 2013

The typhoon that hit the Philippines has caused crop losses worth $110 million and inflicted damage to the agriculture sector of more than twice that figure, preliminary estimates from the United Nation's food agency showed on Tuesday.

Some 153,495 hectares (ha) of rice paddy, maize and other high value crops such as coconut, banana, cassava, mango and vegetables have been hit by Typhoon Haiyan, which killed at least 3,900 people when it struck on Nov. 8.

Source : AP / 14 Sep 2013

Childhood death rates around the world have halved since 1990 but an estimated 6.6 million children under the age of 5 still died last year, the UN children’s agency said Friday.

Nearly half of all children who die are in five countries: Nigeria, Congo, India, Pakistan and China, it said in a report.

By Aamir Saeed / 10 Sep 2013

Three years of repeated floods have inflicted serious damage on Pakistan’s economy, halving its potential economic growth, an expert says.

“The impact of floods on Pakistan’s economy is colossal as the economy grew on average at a rate of 2.9 percent per year during the last three years,” said Ishrat Husain, an economist and director of the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi.

By Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio / 22 Aug 2013

Saleema Bibi died at the age of just 29 when the roof of her house in Talwandi village in northeast Pakistan’s Sialkot district collapsed under heavy monsoon rains. Her husband and three children were badly injured.

“The roof of our house, where we all were sitting on a cot-bed, caved in after failing to withstand torrential rain that lasted for five hours,” sobbed Bibi’s husband, Muzzamil Raza, describing the tragedy that hit his family on Aug. 14.

Source : Robert Evans / 22 Aug 2013

Forty journalists and back-up staff were killed on the job in the first half of this year and the circumstances of another 27 media deaths have yet to be clarified, a media safety group reported on Monday.

Killings often occurred because of the victims’ work in uncovering crime or corruption, while the highest single country total was eight - in Syria where journalists have been targeted by both government and rebel forces in the civil war there.

Source : AFP / 15 Aug 2013

Medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) closed all its operations in war-torn Somalia on Wednesday, warning of growing insecurity, after 22 years of working in the Horn of Africa troublespot.

“The closure of our activities is a direct result of extreme attacks on our staff, in an environment where armed groups and civilian leaders increasingly support, tolerate, or condone the killing, assaulting, and abducting of humanitarian aid workers,” MSF president Unni Karunakara told reporters.

Source : AFP / 13 Aug 2013

The number of people affected by this month’s flooding in Sudan has climbed to around 150,000 and is expected to rise further, the United Nations said on Monday.

More than half the victims, 84,000, are in the area around the capital Khartoum, said the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).