-New Indian Express Bangalore: Child rights activists are fuming over the Department of Public Instruction's (DPI) recent clarification that no section of the Right to Education (RTE) Act applies to unaided minority schools, prompting a need to revisit the Supreme Court order of last April. After several ‘misinforming' statements by its own officials on various public platforms, the DPI, on April 24, clarified that "it would take no initiatives to enforce the...

-PTI JOHANNESBURG: States may not prevent access to websites because they display opinions or beliefs that are critical of governments or established systems of thought, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navanethem "Navi" Pillay said here. Pillay, a South African of Indian Tamil origin, was delivering a lecture on 'Human Rights Achievements and Challenges in a Rapidly Changing World' at the University of the Witwatersrand as part of South Africa's celebration of Human Rights...

KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...

-The Hindu Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, daughter of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and leading lawyer Prashant Bhushan are among 881 individual beneficiaries, companies, societies and trusts granted permission in the last three years to buy land in Himachal Pradesh. The strict land laws that do not permit outsiders or non- agriculturists to buy farm land were relaxed for these select few. The matter of land transactions was raised by Congress MLA Rohit Thakur,...

-The Independent Hardliners defied as historic blueprint to tackle violence against girls and women is agreed at the United Nations A remarkable coalition of Conservative Muslim, Roman Catholic, and liberal Western countries have joined together to approve a historic United Nations blueprint to combat violence against women and girls. In doing so, they ignored strong objections from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood that it clashed with Islamic principles and sought to destroy the family. But...