At least 30 hardcore criminals and mafia dons are contesting this year's assembly elections from jails, which is high even by Uttar Pradesh's standards. What's different, however, is that this time merely two people with criminal records are contesting as mainstream party candidates; the rest are nominees of fringe outfits.  Top among the dons are Prem Prakash Singh aka Munna Bajrangi from Madiyahon (Jaunpur) on an Apna Dal ticket; he is...

Five women — all illegal miners — were buried alive when the roof of a 15ft deep coal pit collapsed on them near Chandrapura junction, 35km from Bokaro steel city, this noon. Two others were injured in the incident. That the mishap took place at Jhungurghuttu, which is a stone’s throw from a bustling railway station and barely 400 metres from the Chandrapura police station, is a clear indication that illegal...

-AFP Later this month, India will be removed from a dwindling list of countries where polio is considered endemic, a huge achievement made possible by people like Madara, a 76-year-old street hawker.  At a temporary immunisation camp in a slum in the northern district of Ghaziabad, 23 kilometres (14 miles) from New Delhi, he is busy at work shepherding boisterous children into queues.  All around, social workers break open tiny bottles containing a...

Of the 22 companies summoned by a Delhi civil court over objectionable content on their webSITes, only Google India submitted today that it had removed certain contentious pages. Facebook, Yahoo! India and Microsoft said there was no cause for action against them. In its affidavit, Facebook told the court that it does not control or operate the servers that host the webSITe at www.facebook.com, which are located in the US. Google...

-Express News Service Work on the survey of land at Gorakhpur village — the SITe for Haryana’s first nuclear power plant — came to a halt on Monday after irate villagers held three engineers of a private company hostage for five hours. According to sources, the engineers of DBM Geo-Technology and Construction Company, working for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, had gone to the village without taking the local administration...