Month: July 2014

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Funds to help farmers adapt to climate change, ultra-modern solar power plants and schemes to promote women’s safety in cities are among pledges the new government made in its first budget on Thursday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which swept to power in May, said in its 2014/15 budget that it would establish a National Adaptation Fund to help millions of farmers adapt to changing weather patterns resulting from global warming. “Climate change is a reality which all of us have to face together. Agriculture as an activity is most prone to the vagaries of climate change,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told parliament.

By Fiona Ortiz CORNELLA DE LLOBREGAT Spain (Reuters) – Francesca Munoz, the principal at Sant Miquel primary school near Barcelona, is fighting a linguistic crusade that has fuelled a remarkable recovery of the local Catalan tongue – and of the region’s secessionist movement. For 30 years, public schools in Spain’s Catalonia region have taught most subjects in Catalan, not the national Castilian Spanish language. There are now some 10 million Catalan speakers in or near the region bordering France and the Mediterranean, putting the language in a league with Swedish and Greek after it was repressed under the 1939-1975 dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Such is the strength of the Catalan renaissance that it is prompting a backlash among some parents concerned their children are getting short-changed on Spanish, the world’s second-most spoken language by native speakers after Mandarin.