Breaking News, Latest Philippines Headlines, World, Entertainment, Politics, Weather & Video News
Hong Kong, China | AFP | Hong Kong saw a net outflow of 113,200 residents over the past year, census data showed Thursday, setting a new record in population decline as the city maintained strict pandemic curbs. The finance hub’s population started shrinking in 2020 for the first time since the SARS epidemic in 2003 — and the drop-off showed no signs of stopping, according to government figures. Mid-year estimates put Hong Kong’s population at […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — China’s population will begin to shrink by 2025, officials have said, as family sizes grow smaller and citizens age. The world’s most-populous country has been grappling with a looming demographic crisis as it faces a rapidly ageing workforce, slowing economy and its weakest population growth in decades. And although officials relaxed the nation’s strict “one-child policy” in 2016 and last year allowed couples to have three children, the birth rate […]
On 15 November 2022, the global population will surpass 8 billion people for the first time, according to a new UN report. Speaking to journalists in New York on Monday (11 July), the Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Inter-Agency Affairs, Maria-Francesca Spatolisano, said “the historic moment calls for celebration.” According to Spatolisano, “population growth is a tangible sign of our collective success in improving the living conditions of everyday people throughout the world.” […]
MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) — Russia’s population declined by more than one million people in 2021, the statistics agency Rosstat reported Friday, a historic drop not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ongoing demographic woes have been exacerbated by the pandemic with Rosstat figures showing more than 660,000 had died with coronavirus since health officials recorded the first case in the country. The new figures continue a downward trend from the previous year […]
by Darko DURIDANSKI with Lajla VESELICA in Brestovac Agence France-Presse VALANDOVO, Republic of North Macedonia (AFP) – Abandoned shops and mostly empty streets offer few signs of life in North Macedonia’s Valandovo, where young people are fleeing in large numbers hoping to find a better life abroad. Like much of this impoverished corner of southeastern Europe, this tiny Balkan nation is sitting on a demographic time bomb fuelled by an ageing population, sinking birth rate […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — China on Monday relaxed its two-child policy to allow couples to have three children, a shift aimed at tackling an ageing society. Here is a timeline of the country’s evolving family planning policy. – One child – In 1979, China imposed a policy forcing couples to have only one baby, introduced by top leader Deng Xiaoping to curb population growth and boost economic development. The population stood at 969 million […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — China has relaxed its family planning policy to allow couples to have three children after a census showed its population is rapidly ageing, state media reported Monday, further unwinding four decades of controls in the world’s most populous nation which have strangled the birthrate. For almost 40 years, China enforced a controversial “one-child policy” — one of the strictest family planning regulations worldwide — which was relaxed in 2016 to […]
SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — South Korea’s population fell for the first time in 2020, with more people dying than were born, the government said Monday, warning that towns in poor regions faced a “crisis of extinction”. The world’s 12th-largest economy has one of its longest life expectancies and one of its lowest birthrates, a combination that presents a looming demographic disaster. As of December 31, South Korea had 51,829,023 people, down 20,838 from a […]
Eagle News — Canadian Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, spoke to a group of immigration lawyers stating that once the pandemic is over, Canada will remain open to immigrants. “Immigration is an economic driver that we rely on” says Mendicino. He also says that immgration is the key to economic recovery in Canada. Mendicino further explains that the need for people to migrate to Canada helps with population. “Canada’s birth rate is too low. There just […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Nearly a quarter of the world’s population lives in 17 countries facing extremely high water stress, close to “day zero” conditions when the taps run dry, according to a report released Tuesday. The World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas ranked water stress, drought risk and riverine flood risk using a peer-reviewed methodology. “Agriculture, industry, and municipalities are drinking up 80 percent of available surface and groundwater in an average […]
The United Nations is highlighting the important role that population trends play in promoting sustainable development, during the annual Commission on Population and Development, which began at UN Headquarters in New York on Monday. This year’s Commission is also an opportunity to take stock and review progress made since the landmark International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which took place 25 years ago in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. The 1994 event resulted in a […]
by Ashraf KHAN A frantic mother cradling her seven-month-old baby rushes towards the special paediatric ward in a desolate Pakistan town, his eyes are blank and he is smaller than most newborns. He is starving in a country that has no shortage of food, but which has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and where malnutrition is rife. The infant weighs just 2.5 kilograms — the average for a healthy child […]
