-The Hindu Business Line A leap backward, says Right to Food Campaign Food rights activists, including National Advisory Council member, Aruna Roy, have called upon all Members of Parliament and political parties to reject the Parliamentary Standing Committee’s recommendations on the National Food Security Bill. Tearing into the Standing Committee’s report, submitted to the Lok Sabha Speaker on January 17, the Right to Food Campaign (RFC), an umbrella of civil society organisations, said...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: In 2006, soon after the Malegaon bomb blasts, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested a Unani medicine practitioner alleging he harboured Pakistanis and smuggled the RDX used in the explosives. After five years in prison, and a year outside on bail, Dr Salman Farsi Monday launched a NGO called Justice Legal Voice (JLV) to provide legal aid to the “wrongly arrested”. Farsi recalls that he was nothing but ‘accused...

-Global Research The widely held belief is that genetically modified ‘terminator seeds’ are not available on the commercial market anywhere. Since 2001, there has been a de facto worldwide moratorium on the use of terminator technology (UN Convention on Biological Diversity). By definition, such seeds are genetically engineered to make them sterile and unusable for replanting, resulting in farmers having to buy new seeds from a central supplier each year. Under Article...

-Deccan Herald Bangalore: While 42 children of ragpickers in Pune are all set to begin a promising academic year under the provisions of the Right To Education Act, domestic workers in Bangalore are waking up to the potential of the provisions to provide better education to their children.    This is mainly due to lack of awareness, according to Domestic Workers Rights Union (DWRM) that comprises nearly 2,200 domestic workers spread across...

-The Hindustan Times The Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda) has been slapped with a show-cause notice for not giving proper reply to an RTI query over shortage of water. In its order dated December 17, the chief information commissioner (CIC) of Haryana, Naresh Gulati, asked the executive engineer of division-2 of Huda, Gurgaon, to furnish correct and complete information to the petitioner free of cost. "The state public information officer-cum-executive engineer, Huda division...