New York  - The tool maker Black & Decker barely scraped into the black with its first quarter results as floundering European demand and the rising dollar ate into profit margins, company results released Thursday showed.

The US firm is projecting diminishing returns for the rest of the year, after earnings dropped by more than 90 per cent from the first quarter last year, to 5 million dollars. Revenues were down by 30 per cent to 1.1 billion dollars.

The results were worse than the firm had expected, prompting an even harsher search to save money, the company said.

Washington - World Bank President Robert Zoellick on Thursday warned that protectionism was rising as governments battle to keep domestic industries alive, and called on wealthy nations to invest more money in social services for poor countries struck by the global recession.

"The danger of protectionism is increasing," Zoellick said at a press conference in Washington, ahead of a semi-annual meeting of members of the World Bank and its sister lender, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this weekend.

According to the findings of a study by the researchers from HSPH - Harvard School of Public Health -, the height of the mother has a significant bearing on the health of a child. The study said that children born to women shorter than 4'9" are 70 percent more likely to die, mostly before attaining the age of five.

Washington, April 23 : Though drinking and driving (DUI) arrests of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan stir up a news storm, little attention is paid to the health consequences, according to a new study.

According to Katherine Smith, PhD, lead author of the study, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health''s Center for Injury Research and Policy, very few articles pointed towards public health contexts.

Washington, Apr 23 : A new study has suggested that Neanderthal women had equally tough time giving birth to big-headed babies as modern humans, but the infants did not have to rotate to get out like they do in human mothers.

Modern women''s birth canals are oval, change shape halfway down the birth canal so that they are widest from front to back at the bottom, near the pelvic outlet.

Thus, the baby has to rotate its head to fit as it moves through the birth canal.

Washington, Apr 23 : Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman has ruled out plans of having more kids with wife Deborra Lee Furness.

The Aussie pair has adopted two multi-racial children, Oscar, who is now eight, and Ava, three, but the X-Men star is determined not to have any more.

"For Deb and me, our family is the most important thing to us, but we travel so much that we fear if we have more kids, it’ll be too much,” Contactmusic quoted Hugh, as telling American magazine Parade.