WHO published its World health statistics report 2025, revealing the deeper health impacts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on loss of lives, longevity and overall health and well-being. In just two years, between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy fell by 1.8 years—the largest drop in recent history— reversing a …
New Delhi, 19 Oct: India has nominated Santiniketan, the university town where Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore founded Visva-Bharati, and the mountain range of Western Ghats for a place in Unesco's World Heritage list, officials said here today. The cultural ministry recommended the inclusion of Santiniketan, the university town 180 km …
In the final years of the Roman Republic, the Senate kept the masses happy by distributing cheap food and staging big spectacles known as the circus games to get votes. In his satires, the Roman poet Juvenal observed witheringly that governance had been reduced to panem et circenses (bread and …
What is common to vuvuzela and carbon capture? The monotone drone heard during the football World Cup and the technique to check climate change are new additions to Oxford Dictionary. The dictionary defines the horn as a long plastic instrument, which makes a very loud noise when blown and is …
Utsa Patnaik Our policymakers would rather let food grains rot than feed the poor. What explains the near-comatose lack of response to a long-brewing crisis of increasing hunger? The most valuable resource that a country has is its people. The poor are not a liability, but an asset; they are …
A piece of floral decoration of one of the minarets of Charminar broke and fell off on Sunday night during heavy downpour. The historic 418-year-old monument is soaked due to spells of heavy rains every night since last Sunday, and parts of the minarets that are carved in lime-mortar paste …
In May 1833, Daniel Wilson, Calcutta's Lord Bishop, wrote to his family in England: "The weather is perfectly suffocating. None can pity us but those who know our sufferings. The mind, body, functions, tempers, words, and feelings are all morbidly affected…a constant heat which unnerves, depresses, annihilates the European mind …
Once in the late 1950s, the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was to address the students of Delhi School of Economics. On such formal occasions, the head of the Delhi School, V K R V Rao, expected students to wear silver-grey, buttoned- up coats with the institution's crest. On the …
Forty thousand years ago, in the caves of Lascaux in southern France, our ancestors lumped animal fat in hollowed-out stone to make lamps. Early settlers in the Shetland Islands would fix a petrel carcass to a base of clay, thread a wick down its throat, and set it alight. In …
I have been to Chennai several times in the past but somehow never noticed the ‘Vivekanandar Illam’ on Marina Beach road. Recently while sifting through some old photographs of the trips, I came across a picture of the building, shot inadvertently while taking some panoramas. It was a large imposing …
A rock painting discovered in June is making Australian scholars rethink the country’s history. The painting discovered in Arnhem Land shows a sailing boat, and historians say it is the nation’s oldest dated picture showing aboriginal people’s first contact with the outside world. Archaeologist Paul Tacon said there are telling …
Chennai: Encouraged by the zeal witnessed at the recent world classical Tamil conference, the state government has decided to fund an undersea expedition to excavate remains of a 2,000-year-old town, Poompuhar or Kaveripoompattinam, submerged under the sea off the Nagapattinam coast in Tamil Nadu. Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography
Food history has become a bit of an exotica of late. We have Nicola Fletcher’s Charlemagne’s Table, Fellipe Fernandes Armesto’s Food A World History and Liz Collingham’s Curry. Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity is an oddity in this smorgasbord. There is hardly any mention of restaurants, chocolate, oysters …
Critics have called it one of the most significant documentary series in the history of Australian television. First Australians chronicles the birth of contemporary Australia through the eyes of its original denizens. Rachel Perkins and team capture 80,000 years of existence in a compelling format which weaves in various individual …
An 18th century library in Aurangabad that shut down in 1970 has thrown its doors open to the public. Once reputed to be one of the biggest libraries in Asia, it had more than 100,000 books and manuscripts in the 1950s. It is situated adjacent to another historic monument, a …
Brij Khandelwa Tourism industry leader Abhinav Jain sees three major threats to the Taj Mahal: from terror- ists, from air pollu- tion and from too many people. Last year also the monu- ment was flooded with tourists and the devout, causing additional stress and pressure on the monument. FROM THREE …
Abakery in the Russian autonomous republic of Tatarstan has signed a unique agreement with the region’s government. It can now use the picture of the republic’s seat of government, Kazan Kremlin, on its products. The large bakery, which produces the Tatar sweet chak-chak, had been using the image since the …
Archaeologists might have unearthed the earliest specimen of Australian rock art. A painting of two giant emu-like birds excavated in the Jwayon region in north Australia could date back 40,000 years. Archaeologist Ben Gunn said genyornis, the species depicted in the painting, became extinct 40,000 years ago. “The details on …
