Four held for Moodbidri murder; top cop urges not to give communal tinge, says MP’s claim false

New Delhi, Mar 19: Senior Congress leader Oscar Fernandes on Wednesday extolled the virtues of 'gaumutra' and shared an anecdote about a man claiming to have cured his cancer by drinking cow urine to drive his point home.

Participating in a debate in Rajya Sabha on two bills for setting up national commissions for homoeopathy and Indian systems of medicine, the former Union minister said, "My extreme friend Jairam Ramesh pulls my leg, when I talk of 'gaumutra'."

Sharing an anecdote, Fernandes said once during a visit to an ashram near Meerut he had met a person who claimed to have cured his cancer by drinking 'gaumutra'.

Many BJP leaders have earlier spoken about the healing power of 'gaumutra'. The Congress has reacted sharply to such remarks.

He also praised the virtues of the Indian systems of medicine. He said when he had severe pain in knee joint and doctors had suggested for replacement surgery. However, he refused and started doing 'Vajrasana'.

"I started Vajrasana, practising yoga, and today I am able to do wrestling without any difficulty," the septuagenarian leader said.

"When (former) prime minister (Atal Bihari) Vajypee ji had a knee surgery, I thought if I had known him earlier, I would have definitely gone to him and ask him to follow 'Vajrasan' and it could have been cured," he said.

He also claimed to have met a person in US aged around 104 years and moving swiftly as a young man.

"Yoga is our wealth. If you practise yoga, may be our budget cost of health can be reduced by 50 per cent. It's way of life," he said.

"Our own Indian systems of medicine will provide a lot of reliefs even before going to a doctor," he said.

Though Fernandes supported the bills but raised objection over the exclusion of yoga and naturopathy.

"I would urge the minister either to amend the bill or bring an assurance that it will bring a separate legislation to cover yoga and naturopathy," he said.

India ranked 77th on a sustainability index that takes into account per capita carbon emissions and ability of children in a nation to live healthy lives and secures 131st spot on a flourishing ranking that measures the best chance at survival and well-being for children, according to a UN-backed report.

The report was released on Wednesday by a commission of over 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world. It was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and The Lancet medical journal.

In the report assessing the capacity of 180 countries to ensure that their youngsters can survive and thrive, India ranks 77th on the Sustainability Index and 131 on the Flourishing Index, it said.

Flourishing is the geometric mean of Surviving and Thriving. For Surviving, the authors selected maternal survival, survival in children younger than 5 years old, suicide, access to maternal and child health services, basic hygiene and sanitation, and lack of extreme poverty.

For Thriving, the domains were educational achievement, growth and nutrition, reproductive freedom, and protection from violence.

Under the Sustainability Index, the authors noted that promoting today's national conditions for children to survive and thrive must not come at the cost of eroding future global conditions for children's ability to flourish.

The Sustainability Index ranks countries on excess carbon emissions compared with the 2030 target. This provides a convenient and available proxy for a country's contribution to sustainability in future.

The report noted that under realistic assumptions about possible trajectories towards sustainable greenhouse gas emissions, models predict that global carbon emissions need to be reduced from 39·7 giga­ tonnes to 22·8 gigatonnes per year by 2030 to maintain even a 66 per cent chance of keeping global warming below 1·5°C.

It said that the world's survival depended on children being able to flourish, but no country is doing enough to give them a sustainable future.

"No country in the world is currently providing the conditions we need to support every child to grow up and have a healthy future," said Anthony Costello, Professor of Global Health and Sustainability at University College London, one of the lead authors of the report.

"Especially, they're under immediate threat from climate change and from commercial marketing, which has grown hugely in the last decade," said Costello – former WHO Director of Mother, Child and Adolescent health.

Norway leads the table for survival, health, education and nutrition rates - followed by South Korea and the Netherlands. Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia come at the bottom.

However, when taking into account per capita CO2 emissions, these top countries trail behind, with Norway 156th, the Republic of Korea 166th and the Netherlands 160th.

Each of the three emits 210 per cent more CO2 per capita than their 2030 target, the data shows, while the US, Australia, and Saudi Arabia are among the 10 worst emitters. The lowest emitters are Burundi, Chad and Somalia.

According to the report, the only countries on track to beat CO2 emission per capita targets by 2030, while also performing fairly – within the top 70 – on child flourishing measures are: Albania, Armenia, Grenada, Jordan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Uruguay and Vietnam.

"More than 2 billion people live in countries where development is hampered by humanitarian crises, conflicts, and natural disasters, problems increasingly linked with climate change," said Minister Awa Coll-Seck from Senegal, Co-Chair of the commission.

The report also highlights the distinct threat posed to children from harmful marketing.

Evidence suggests that children in some countries see as many as 30,000 advertisements on television alone in a single year, while youth exposure to vaping (e-cigarettes) advertisements increased by more than 250 per cent in the US over two years, reaching more than 24 million young people.

Studies in Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and the US – among many others – have shown that self-regulation has not hampered commercial ability to advertise to children.

Children's exposure to commercial marketing of junk food and sugary beverages is associated with purchase of unhealthy foods and overweight and obesity, linking predatory marketing to the alarming rise in childhood obesity, it said.

The number of obese children and adolescents increased from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016 – an 11-fold increase, with dire individual and societal costs, the report said.

To protect children, the authors call for a new global movement driven by and for children.

Specific recommendations include stopping CO2 emissions with the utmost urgency, to ensure children have a future on this planet; placing children and adolescents at the centre of global efforts to achieve sustainable development, the report said.

New policies and investment in all sectors to work towards child health and rights; incorporating children's voices into policy decisions and tightening national regulation of harmful commercial marketing, supported by a new Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it said.

Davangere, Jul 19: A 9-year-old sniffer dog ran 12 km in the night to trace a murder accused and helped the police arrest him in Karnataka's Davangere rural area, an official said on Sunday.

"Doberman Pincher Tunga ran 12 km non-stop from the crime spot at Basavapattana in the city to a house at Kashipur in the rural where murder accused Chethan, 25, was hiding and helped us arrest him on July 17," Davangere Police Superintendent Hanumantha Rai said on phone.

Davangere is 260 km northwest of Bengaluru.

"Though Chethan allegedly shot dead his friend Chandra Nayak with a stolen service revolver on July 10 over sharing the booty (gold ornaments) of the theft they had committed recently with two others. We took female dog Tunga to the crime spot on July 16. She led the sleuths to the area where Chethan was hiding with two accomplices," Rai recalled.

While trained sniffer dogs normally run 4-5 km from a crime spot, Tunga could track the accused 12 km away.

When Tunga's handler (Head Constable Prakash) took her to the crime scene at 9.30 pm, she sniffed around and ran 12 km non-stop to Kashipur. She halted at a wine shop and went to a food joint later. Then she stopped at a house nearby at 12.30 am.

The prime accused (Chethan) was present in the house of his relative. He was arrested after he confessed to the theft and the murder.

The police are on the hunt to trace Chethan's two accomplices who fled from the house they were hiding in.

Karnataka Additional Director General of Police (law and order) Amar Kumar Pandey felicitated Tunga on July 17 at a function here for cracking the murder case with its exceptional sniffing traits.