Farmers in Gadag district who succeeded in making the government revisit its decision to acquire land for housing South Korea’s Posco Steel Company, are now facing the prospect of their land being acquired for setting up agro-based industries. The government has decided to keep land ready in view of the Global Agri-Business Investment and Food Processing Meet 2011. This time, instead of Halligudi, over 3,800 acres in Petalur, Jantli-Shirur and Mevundi...

Fighting the insurgency will need careful planning and sustained innovation. But New Delhi seems to have only big sacks of cash and even bigger words. Eleven weeks after the annihilation of an entire company of the Central Reserve Police Force in a Maoist ambush in April 2010 near the village of Tarmetla — the largest single loss India has ever suffered in a counter-insurgency campaign — Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram...

-The United Nations   The prices of grain and milk in the drought-hit Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia have risen to record highs, exacerbating hardship for the estimated 12.4 million people in the region who are facing severe food shortages and famine in some parts of Somalia, the United Nations reported today. According to the August food price monitor of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the high prices of cereals...

-PTI     TIRUCHIRAPALLI: In an effort to use human urine as fertiliser, efforts to set up the country's first Human Urine Bank have been initiated at Musiri, about 35 km from here. The initiative, a joint effort of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and Society for Community Organisation and People's Education (SCOPE), Musiri, was launched to help extraction of Struvite from urine. Struvite is a phosphate mineral that can be...

The Supreme Court's threat to award death penalty for fake encounters will make little difference to the impunity enjoyed by security forces. For, its own stay order in another case comes in the way of any murder case being booked against killers in uniform. The stay order, passed two years ago by a bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, K G Balakrishnan, has rolled back an attempt made...