-The Pioneer The mega exercise of wheat procurement from farmers on support price will get underway from March 15 in Madhya Pradesh. Till May 20, about 65 lakh metric tonne of wheat will be purchased from farmers in 67 days at the rate of about one lakh metric tonne per day. Under the scheme, e-procurement system has been adopted for the first time in the State in order to prevent any irregularity...

-The Economist   Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...

Mao Zedong's only living grandson has suggested that the ideas of China's Great Helmsman were being misused by groups such as the Maoists in India, who were invoking his image to wage violence against the state. The greater relevance of Mao's philosophy in today's world was “to help maintain peace, stability and development” and create a more equitable global order, he said, suggesting that the former Chairman's ideas of “people's war”...

Even as speculation that Communist Party of India (Maoist) Polit Bureau member Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, was killed in a fake encounter refuses to die down, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attempted to clear the air on Friday. “Kishenji's death was not something that we did knowingly. It was an incident that occurred,” Ms. Banerjee told journalists at the State Secretariat. Speaking to journalists after the surrender of leading Maoist leader Suchitra...

-Express News Service   The newly elected Samajwadi Party MLA from Bah, Aridaman Singh, and nine supporters were today Booked for the murder of the husband of a Dalit village pradhan. Munna Lal — who virtually ran the show in the name of his wife Guddi Devi, the actual pradhan of Parvati Purva village — was beaten to death in Agra on Thursday reportedly for refusing to vote for the Samajwadi Party candidate...