India will resist any attempt by developed countries to take away the right of World Trade Organisation (WTO)-member nations to restrict export of food items and raise import tariffs beyond existing levels.  Trade ministers of WTO-member countries are meeting in Geneva on Thursday to try and identify issues that can be discussed till the US presidential elections are over next year.  The meeting is also likely to take up proposals to "cherry-pick"...

A tragic fire broke out in the Advanced Medicare & Research Institute (AMRI) Hospital in Kolkata early Friday morning in which 91 persons have died, making it one of the worst tragedies in any hospital in India. Many patients died while asleep.The government has ordered a judicial probe which shall run parallel to the inquiry under police's detective department. AMRI hospital, where the unfortunate incident occurred, is a private hospital and...

-The Hindu   Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...

While Asian economies boomed before the global recession in 2008, the fruits of that progress did not translate into better wages or secure employment conditions for workers in the region. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s Asian Decent Work Decade launched in 2006 was aimed at five priority areas of competitiveness, productivity and jobs; labour market governance; youth employment, managing labour migration and local development for poverty reduction. Today workers' unions are...

Five States did manage a significant decline in the average number of farm suicides between 2003 and 2010. However, more States have reported increases over the same period. The television story was genuine and sensitive. At least 90 farmers, it said, had committed suicide in two months in Andhra Pradesh. These were cotton growers. Actually, last year, Andhra farmers killed themselves at the rate of 210 each month on average, according...