-The Hindu   The door between the cubicle of suspected Indian Mujahideen operative Mohammad Qateel Siddiqui and that of his killer, Sharad Mohol, was left unguarded, and the guard and hawaldar concerned have been suspended, official sources said on Tuesday. Siddiqui, a key accused in the Bangalore blast case and suspect in the conspiracy to blow up a Pune temple, was murdered in the high-security Anda Cell of Pune's Yerwada jail last week. Sharad...

Union Cabinet approves negotiating brief   India will head to the Rio+20 summit in Brazil with a negotiating brief focussed on defending the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR) and preventing any attempt to pin down specific goals or targets regarding sustainable development. On Thursday, the Union Cabinet approved the strategy to be followed by Indian negotiators at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly known as Rio+20 due to the...

-The Hindu The killing of the Ranvir Sena chief and the violence it triggered expose the fragile foundations of Nitish Kumar's ‘new Bihar'   The assassination of Brahmeshwar Singh alias Mukhiya, founder of Ranvir Sena, the dreaded private army of upper caste Bhumihars, raises fears of the revival of “Barbaric Bihar”. From the first major massacre of Dalits in Belchi in 1977 to the killings in Mianpur in 2000 by socially dominant castes...

Past two months saw B D Sharma negotiating release of high-profile hostages by the Maoists in Odisha and Chhattisgarh. TV viewers saw and heard Sharma, probably for the first time. Widely respected in the civil society, he has been championing the rights of tribals for four decades now. He served as collector in the undivided Bastar district of Chhattisgarh in the 1970s, after which he quit the Indian Administrative Service....

-The United Nations Almost 21 million people worldwide are trapped in jobs into which they were coerced or deceived and which they cannot leave, according to new estimates released today by the United Nations labour agency. Released by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the 2012 Global Estimate of Forced Labour found that the Asia-Pacific region accounts for the largest number of the 20.9 million forced labourers in the world – 11.7 million,...