-PTI   Fresh efforts by officials to persuade villagers to allow resumption of work at the proposed Posco plant site near here failed, paralysing project related activities for the seventh day on Monday. Discussions were held with residents of Nuagaon in a bid to persuade them to give up their protest against tree felling, ground levelling and other works, Additional District Magistrate (Paradip), Surjit Das said. Three officials of Jagatsinghpur district administration, including Das,...

-The Indian Express   Roughly three decades after Tamil Nadu devised the mid-day meal scheme for schoolchildren, the Jayalalithaa government is working on extending it to breakfast as well. Like neighbouring Puducherry, the state will ensure that schoolchildren are provided a healthy start to the day. Some private and corporation schools have already experimented with the idea. Tamil Nadu’s welfare schemes have been remarkably efficient because of political determination, imaginative policy-making and implementation,...

An international website that helped sustain recent mass movements in countries such as Syria, Libya, Canada and Brazil has involved itself in the Anna Hazare campaign. Avaaz.org is co-founded by Res Publica, an American “community of public sector professionals dedicated to promoting good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy”, and MoveOn.org, an American “non-profit progressive public policy advocacy group”. Avaaz has the expertise to manage funds, strategies and propaganda for public campaigns...

The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information has rejected Anna Hazare’s Jan Lokpal bill and said it had sent its version of the proposed anti-graft law to the parliamentary standing committee that is examining the Centre’s draft. At a media interaction today, NCPRI members Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander, who are also part of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), emphasised the importance of the standing committee which, they...

-PTI   The shocking murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood on August 16 was a bleak reminder of at least two such incidents in the past involving the women victims, who some way or the other had been associated with public life and died under mysterious circumstances, sources in local police said. Congress leader On February 15, 1997, the burnt body of Congress leader Sarla Mishra was found in her flat in the South...