-Tehelka Are we eating sugar which small kids are producing as bonded labour? FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mahendra Singh used to live with his parents and two siblings in the Jahangirpuri slum area of New Delhi until the morning he was abducted, trafficked and then callously ‘sold’ to a sugarcane farmer of Haryana’s Karnal district. Mahendra was made to work as a bonded labourer in the sugarcane fields for three-and-a-half long years, until he finally...

-The Telegraph Jhargram: A farmer who had accused chief minister Mamata Banerjee of making false promises to Jungle Mahal’s poor at her Wednesday rally was picked up a second time on Friday night and slapped with non-bailable charges. Forty-something Shiladitya Chowdhury, who owns a one-bigha plot, has been charged with assaulting and injuring government officials three days after the police apparently let him go because they could find no evidence that he...

-The Telegraph Ten-year-old Ayush Chauhan was smart as well as lucky. The Class IV student gave a fictitious phone number to the three kidnappers who had dragged him into a car on a Ghaziabad street on May 11. As they kept trying the number to make a ransom call to his father, Ayush gave them the slip. Eighteen-day-old Saumya Lodi had no such luck when two masked men kidnapped her from her home...

-The Hindu Death toll in Uttarakhand alone is 28 After weeks of deficient monsoon in the northwestern region, the three Himalayan States of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as well as Uttar Pradesh, on Saturday faced cloudbursts, landslips and floods, causing at least 31 deaths. Authorities issued a flood alert as the level in the Chenab, Tawi, Ujh and Basantar rivers approached the danger mark in Jammu. In Himachal Pradesh, the police...

-The Hindu Supreme Court asks Chhattisgarh to pay doctor Rs. 5 lakh for mental agony The Supreme Court, coming down heavily on Chhattisgarh police officers for custodial torture of an Ayurvedic doctor in 1992, directed the State government to pay him Rs. 5 lakh as compensation for the mental agony and humiliation he suffered. It is to be recovered from the erring officers in equal proportion. Allowing an appeal from Mehmood Nayyar Azam,...