-The Hindu Twenty years after the Babri Masjid riots, a survivor recounts her tale of horror Mumbai: It may be 20 years for everyone else but for Safia (name changed on request), it seems like 20 seconds. Overwhelmed by the nationwide outrage over the Delhi gang rape, she is anguished that no one helped when she and her 19-year-old daughter were stripped and gang-raped. The mob burnt her daughter alive while she managed...

-The Hindu Chennai: The Tamil Nadu experiment of engaging thousands of differently abled persons under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has prompted the Union government to replicate the model in the rest of the country. “We have incorporated the TN model in our national guidelines,” according to Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh. What has impressed the Centre is not only the extent of engaging the differently-abled but...

-PTI The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Centre on a PIL seeking to make intelligence agencies IB, RAW and NTRO accountable to Parliament. A bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir sought response from the Centre and the three intelligence wings for bringing the agencies under the oversight of Parliament and CAG. The bench also asked Attorney General G E Vahanvati to assist it in deciding the PIL filed by...

-The Guardian By shunning all but organic farming techniques, the Himalayan state will cement its status as a paradigm of sustainability Bhutan plans to become the first country in the world to turn its agriculture completely organic, banning the sales of pesticides and herbicides and relying on its own animals and farm waste for fertilisers. But rather than accept that this will mean farmers of the small Himalayan kingdom of 1.2 million people...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: Chief minister J Jayalalithaa on Friday declared that all districts of Tamil Nadu, except Chennai, were drought-hit. After a disastrous monsoon and with Karnataka proving intractable on release of Cauvery water, experts said the CM's statement appeared calculated to buttress the state's case in court for immediate relief. But Jayalalithaa injected the declaration with a sense of urgency, saying finance minister O Paneerselvam would lead a high-level team...