WASHINGTON: Time magazine has named veer Bhadra Mishra, a revered priest at a Varanasi temple and also a hydraulics engineer and activist, as one of its ``seven heroes for the planet'' for his herculean efforts to save the Ganga from pollution. Mishra is recognised not only as a holy man but also as a world class civil engineer who heads a university civil engineering department, the magazine says in its latest issue. ``He was moved to launch a vigorous campaign, unable to bear the sight of corpses and filth floating on his beloved mother, Ganga,'' it said. He told Time that he was motivated by ``respect and love for the mother''.

Vietnamese rhinoceros survives war, poachers

WASHINGTON: Long thought extinct, a victim of poachers and war, the Javan rhinoceros of Vietnam is actually clinging to a tenuous existence. The first photographs were offered as proof on Friday that a handful no more than six or eight had survived in a bamboo forest inan area that had been largely decimated during the Vietnam war. ``It's the most endangered mammal species in the world,'' said Steve Osofsky, a rhinoceros expert at the World Wildlife Fund. During the war and in the years that followed, it was widely felt the rhino had disappeared. But there had been talk of sighting among villagers. Tracks found in the muddy, thick bamboo-forested terrain provided additional clues but not certainty. This spring, specialists including wildlife photographer Mike Baltzer trekked into the rhino's suspected habitat. They set up 10 cameras, each triggered when an animal crossed a beam. And they waited.

Baby in embryo mix-up restored to parents

NEW YORK: The biological parents of a black baby, who was born to a white couple because of an embryo mix-up at a fertility clinic, have received permanent custody of the baby. Both couples were in court together when Justice Diane Lebedeff signed the order. It gives permanent legal custody of Akeil Richard Rogers, born JosephFasano, to Deborah Perry-Rogers and Robert Rogers. The baby was born on December 29, along with another boy, to Donna and Richard Fasano. The Fasanos considered the boys fraternal twins and had planned to raise both, until the Rogerses sued them. Rudolph Silas, the Rogerses' lawyer, blames the situation on doctors at the fertility clinic where both women had stored fertilized eggs and where both went on April 24, 1998, to have the eggs implanted in their uteruses.