-The Indian Express   The world's population will reach 7 billion in five days, the UN has said as it urged the global community to seize the opportunity and invest in health and education of its youth. Actions taken now will decide whether the future will be healthy, sustainable and prosperous or marked by inequalities, environmental decline and economic setbacks, a United Nations report has said. "The world must seize the opportunity to invest...

Police officers of Chhattisgarh would have us believe that people fall inside bathrooms at police stations deliberately to break their own heads or backs and later blame it on custodial torture. They say that’s what happened with Soni Sori, an ashramshala teacher from Jabeli village in the Maoist-affected Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, on October 10. In pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, benumbed by the ‘good cop, bad cop’...

Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...

Maulana Syed Mohammad Ashraf Kachochavi is the General Secretary of the All-India Ulama & Mashaikh Board (AIUMB), a Sufi sect that came from nowhere to take Moradabad — and the Muslim world — by storm last week. Soft-spoken and gentle, with long robes and a flowing beard, he fits the part of the Sufi cleric to perfection. Yet on stage at the Sufi Maha Panchyat, he roared like a lion, hurling...

-Kashmir Observer   New Delhi’s claims of the AFSPA not standing in the way of justice for victims of forces’ atrocities in Kashmir have been exposed further by civil society activism squeezing incriminating data out of the government.    With public organisations asserting almost 8000 enforced disappearances among innumerably more human rights violations at the hands of the central armed forces and the state police in Kashmir in the past two decades, the state...