A widow in Orissa's Jajpur district died of starvation after remaining bedridden for several days, a village leader said Thursday. Seventy-two years of age, Kolhanai Bewa, died at her village Mahisara last Tuesday after she did not get sufficient food to survive, local village council Chief Sudharsan Behera said. She was without food for three days before her death, he said.

When she began planning the Interfaith Hunger Convocation six months ago, North Texas Food Bank CEO Jan Pruitt wondered whether it could even be organized without offending someone. She soon discovered that Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims can agree on at least one thing: Fighting hunger is a holy undertaking. "We're more alike than we're different," Pruitt said. "There's a lot of commonness in what each religion tries to do, especially around the poor."

In all, an estimated one billion people - or one in five people in the developing world - still live below the extreme poverty line. Prospects were significantly brighter in Asia where economic growth in the world's most populous countries, China and India, helped reduce the number of people in extreme poverty by 250 million from 1990 to 2001.

Little Surendra Majhi doesn't quite know what home is. Nobody, it seems, wants to give him shelter for very long. He was only a year old when seven members of his family, including his mother, died in the infamous mango kernel starvation deaths in southern Orissa Nov 13, 2001. Since then he has been shunted back and forth from his home to orphanages.