-The Hindu Court rulings on freebies, elections and caste-based rallies, and the CIC order on political parties are a beginning towards cleansing politics but whether they can achieve the desired result is debatable The slew of judgments from the higher judiciary in the period of just about a month or so has been like manna from heaven on the parched earth of electoral reforms. First, the Supreme Court frowned upon freebies, which...

-The Hindu That the Union Health Ministry takes critical decisions affecting a large number of people without any scientific basis does not portend well for public health in India. Neither the ban imposed on the oral anti-diabetes drug pioglitazone on June 18 nor its revocation a month later with a requirement that the medicine be sold with a boxed warning highlighting the adverse side-effect of bladder cancer was based on any...

-Live Mint Numbers confirm Bihar's structural shift away from agriculture, with sharp increase in share of services sector Bihar has revised its economic growth for 2012-13 to 14.48%, five percentage points higher than what was initially forecast, according to two officials at the state's directorate of statistics. The new numbers confirm the state's structural shift away from agriculture, with a sharp increase in the share of the tertiary or services sector. The data...

-The Business Standard The tragedy involving the death of children in a Bihar school should reinforce recent efforts to improve the programme, notes Amarjeet Sinha. The sad loss of 23 innocent lives after consuming hot cooked meals in a school in Bihar has rightly shocked and angered people. The highly poisonous pesticide monocrotophos found in children's food and a headmistress overlooking the cook and the children's protests about the oil and not...

-IANS Bangalore: A leading journal of medical ethics has charged the World Health Organization (WHO) with promoting the Pentavalent vaccine in countries, including India, though it is known to have caused adverse reactions and deaths in children. In a hard-hitting editorial, the latest issue of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), has accused the WHO of promoting the vaccine "by stating falsely that no adverse event following immunisation (AEFI) has ever...