-The Telegraph Income tax officials today searched the house and two dozen properties of a liquor baron said to be close to Mayawati, the simultaneous raids apparently throwing up a chest that needed gas-cutters to prise open. TV reports claimed the chest — found in the basement of a Noida mall said to be owned by Gurdeep Singh Chadha — could be stashed with notes worth over Rs 100 crore, but late...

-The Economic Times   The IMF wants to increase its lending capacity by $1 trillion, to rescue distressed countries in the eurozone plus those hit by aftershocks from the eurozone.  But US is struggling with fiscal problems of its own, Japan now has the highest debt/GDP ratio in the world (over 200%), and Europe is moving into an austerity phase. Clearly, a significant chunk of the new trillion will have to come from...

Questionable drug trials on mentally challenged persons by doctors in Indore emphasise the need for strict enforcement of medical ethics. IN what appears to be a page out of Robin Cook's medical thriller, government and private doctors in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, reportedly carried out clinical trials of various medicines on some 233 patients who had gone to them seeking psychiatric treatment. As in Cook's famous book Coma, in which a medical...

-The United Nations Cooperatives and producer organizations will be increasingly important in efforts to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today. “FAO needs strong cooperatives and producer organizations as key partners in the effort to eliminate hunger for some 925 million people, and to respond to the many challenges that face our world today,” said Director-General José Graziano da Silva. He told...

India's economic growth has added over seven million new jobs every year for almost a quarter of a century. Workers have seen their wages - adjusted for prices - rise by nearly 3% a year. Poverty rates among wage workers and the self-employed have fallen. Going forward, with swelling numbers of new entrants - and more women entering the job market , as was the case during east Asia's rapid...