-The Telegraph   Stress strikes the pupils of a Murshidabad school every day not because of impenetrable syllabus or unsparing teachers but because they fear the Padma river can rise up and engulf them any minute. All it took for a wave of panic to crash in today was the rattle of tin cans on a truck and an exclamation from a teacher, which triggered a stampede in which 20 children were injured. The...

-The Telegraph   The Sonia-Gandhi headed National Advisory Council will prod the government to bring a law to protect unorganised retail sector workers as it brings foreign direct investment into multi-brand retail. Sonia, the council chairperson and the Congress chief, showed the green flag to the government on FDI in retail. The NAC in 2005 had drafted the unorganised sector workers’ social security bill that proposed a national authority to oversee the implementation of...

—Xinhua Deepening degradation and scarcity of land and water resources pose a severe challenge to the world's capacity to meet human demands by 2050, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf said on Monday. FAO report In the last 50 years, a significant increase in food production combined with demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture practices have spoiled the land and water systems upon which food production depended, Diouf told a press...

Chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission of France Bernard Bigot on Monday said the controversial European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) technology was re-evaluated after the Fukushima disaster and it had got the green signal from the nuclear safety regulatory bodies of his country, the United Kingdom and Finland. The three regulatory bodies had expressed reservations about the design aspects of the EPR. This happened due to greater transparency, which was the top...

The United Progressive Alliance government appeared determined on Monday not to roll back its decision to permit foreign direct investment (FDI) in the multi-brand retail sector, despite intense pressure from allies and the Opposition alike, not to mention the Congress' Uttar Pradesh unit which faces an uphill task in next year's Assembly polls. At best, sources said, the government might postpone a decision on its implementation by referring it to an...