-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself.  China, Malaysia, Singapore and bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive.  But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...

-The Hindu Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international human rights body, has urged the government of India to probe the fresh allegations of human rights violations by the personnel of the Border Security Force (BSF) along the bangladesh border and prosecute those responsible. According to HRW's latest report, despite assurances to bangladesh and public orders to end unlawful killings and attacks on suspected smugglers, evidence documented and published by Indian and bangladeshi...

The Mamata Banerjee government is gearing to fight the Centre afresh for an additional allotment of subsidised rice to keep a pet project afloat. A shortage of cheap grain has hit the state’s Rs 2-a-kg rice scheme for about 20 lakh “needy” people who don’t figure on the below-poverty-line (BPL) list, with supplies having been stopped in the Darjeeling hills since April. Although the Centre had made it clear on March 12...

In a bangladeshi folk story, a disabled grandfather is carried by his son in a basket, to be abandoned in the forest. On seeing this, the grandson calls out, 'Father, please be sure to bring back the basket. I will need it when you grow old'. Three thousand ageing men and women gathered in Delhi in the blazing midsummer heat to demand a universal pension for all aged people, not...

Even as the government races against time to procure enough jute bags to store grains in the face of record procurement , gunnysack traders are saddled with massive unsold stocks. A look at the godowns of some traders in the national capital alone shows there is no shortage of jute bags in the country. While the central government has placed an order for four lakh jute bags to be imported from...