-The United Nations Devastating weather patterns and increasing temperatures will last into the foreseeable future as global warming is expected to continue, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed today as it explained that 2014's ranking as the "hottest year on record" is part of a larger climate trend. "The overall warming trend is more important than the ranking of an individual year," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud clarified today in a...

-The Hindu The Shanta Kumar Committee's recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the...

-The Hindu Opposition to amendments in the Land Acquisition Act that were brought through an ordinance by the Modi government recently is growing. Political parties, farmers' organisations affiliated to political parties as well as civil society movements across the country have expressed their reservation to it. On Wednesday, the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal staged protests against the ordinance: across Uttar Pradesh, party activists raised slogans against the BJP-led NDA government, at...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Sections of wildlife biologists have questioned the methodology India has adopted for its tiger census, saying it does not yield results to accurately measure changes in numbers either within a particular region or across the country. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a non-government partner that was involved in the tiger estimation exercise, said the "double-sampling" approach the Union environment and forests ministry adopted was "not the best currently...

-The Hindu Although urban Indians are slowly showing more openness in their attitudes towards women's attire, this is not the case when it comes to the issue of son preference As one of the world's most socially heterogeneous societies, building solidarity across social groups has been a singular challenge in India. Social bias in India is pervasive across a range of key cleavages - whether caste or class, region or religion. In this...