Child mortality rates drop
The global mortality rate for children younger than 5 has dropped by nearly half since 1990, the United Nations said Tuesday in an annual report on ensuring child survival, but the decline still falls short of the organization's goal of a two-thirds reduction by next year. Nearly all of the countries with the highest mortality rates are in Africa, the report said, and two countries — India and Nigeria — account for nearly a third of all deaths among children under 5. The mortality rate for children younger than 5 fell to 46 deaths per 1,000 live births last year, from 90 per 1,000 births in 1990.
800 million are hungry
More than 800 million people worldwide do not get enough to eat, even as the world produces more than twice as much food as it needs, according to figures released Tuesday by the United Nations. Hunger has declined slowly over the past decade: 11.3 percent of the world's population was clinically undernourished in the 2012-14 period, down from 18.7 percent in the 1990-92 period. Chad, Central African Republic and Ethiopia have some of the highest rates of undernourished people. In Iraq, the share of hungry people has soared: Nearly one in four Iraqis are undernourished, the report said.
U.S. prison numbers climb
Breaking three consecutive years of decline, the number of people in state and federal prisons climbed slightly in 2013, according to a Justice Department report released Tuesday. The report put the prison population last year at 1,574,700, an increase of 4,300 over the previous year, yet below its high of 1,615,487 in 2009. In what criminologists called an encouraging sign, the number of federal prisoners showed a modest drop for the first time in years. But the federal decline was more than offset by a jump in the number of inmates at state prisons.
New York Times
