-PTI Batting for bringing flexibility in UPA's flagship NREGA, Union Minister Jairam Ramesh on Sunday said the scheme has failed to achieve the three objectives of wage employment, creating community assets and empowering gram panchayats at the same time in any state. Stating that all jobs cannot be provided in areas where the youths want them, he called for encouraging migration across all states and noted with concern the "discrimination" in housing...

-The Hindu     With the closing of relief camps in Muzaffarnagar, even the meagre food support has disappeared. As the winter cold descends this year on Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in Western U.P., some 20,000 people will camp in makeshift unofficial camps amidst squalor and official neglect, or survive in small rented tenements or with relatives - exiles from the villages of their birth. Three months after one of the grimmest communal outbreaks...

-The Hindu The camps were set up in the aftermath of September's communal violence MUZAFFARNAGAR: Three months after the high-profile visits of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi to various relief camps, riot-affected Muslims belonging to at least half-a-dozen villages are still to return to their native villages. Large scale violence that erupted in this sugarcane belt in August-September this year has a left deep scar on the psyche of these...

-The United Nations The number of people killed by malaria has been cut by nearly half in Africa and a slightly lower rate globally, but sustained funding is needed to lower the numbers even more, according to the United Nations health agency which today released its annual assessment report on the disease. "This remarkable progress is no cause for complacency: absolute numbers of malaria cases and deaths are not going down as...

-Frontline Childhood TB has been neglected for decades, but in the past few years the WHO has begun to realise its real impact in terms of incidence, prevalence and mortality. THE number of annual new tuberculosis (TB) cases in India has been nearly 2.2 million for the past couple of years. Many of these infected people would have been in contact with children aged under five years before being diagnosed and,...