The Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill is a first step towards granting functional autonomy to the country's nuclear regulator. THE true independence and functional autonomy of the existing Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been questioned for long. The issue gained further importance in recent months after it was raised in many quarters in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March in Japan. To allay public fears as...

-The Hindu   As a natural calamity, powerful earthquakes are in a class of their own, able to strike without warning and capable of creating widespread devastation. So it was with the magnitude 6.8 temblor that struck near the Sikkim-Nepal border on Sunday evening. At least 66 people have been killed and many more injured in India as well as in neighbouring Nepal and Tibet, China. Buildings and roads in Sikkim have...

The 2002 Gujarat riots victims gathered at Naroda Patiya and sent an open letter to Narendra Modi seeking justice. Here's the full text of the letter: Dear Narendrabhai Why do you have to undertake this Sadbhavna Mission by observing three days upvaas?? No other Chief Minister of the 26 States in India has to do such a prayaschit to earn sadbhavna! Have you finally realized after about a decade that all the...

-The United Nations   A United Nations human rights expert today called for taxing unhealthy food, regulating harmful marketing practices and standing up to the food industry, urging world leaders not to miss the chance at a summit next week to end a state of affairs that kills nearly 3 million adults each year. “Voluntary guidelines are not enough. World leaders must not bow to industry pressure,” Special Rapporteur on the Right to...

Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...