-The Hindustan Times I remember her face but not her name. She was one of the 30 people I met one winter afternoon in 2009 at Basaguda village in Chhattisgarh's Maoist-hit Bijapur district. A thin, tall woman, she stood at the edge of the group, listening attentively to her neighbour who was narrating an incident of an armed attack on the village that had left them homeless for months. When my...

-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: The Bengal government-designed potato shortage has prompted vegetable sellers in Odisha to plan a retaliation. The traders' associations in Balasore have threatened to detain trucks carrying essential commodities and fish from Andhra Pradesh and other states to Bengal on the national highway passing through this district in retaliation to the Bengal government's decision. Despite chief minister Naveen Patnaik requesting his counterpart in Bengal, the largest supplier of potato to Odisha,...

-Outlook New Delhi: Investing in education of girls, especially the most marginalised, is required to make progress on most social indicators in India, according to UNICEF. To mark the second International Day of the Girl Child, UNICEF today organised a meeting with top Urdu editors in the capital. Speaking at the event, Urmila Sarkar, Chief of Education UNICEF, said, "Innovation in girls education will be instrumental to female empowerment and breaking the cycle...

-The Business Standard A recent academic paper on probability theory shows how beliefs are influenced by interpretations of data rather than the data itself Ever since Indira Gandhi turned it into a closely-held family company - and even more so since Sonia Gandhi turned it into a brain-dead dinosaur - one of the hallmarks of the Congress party is that it often ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Whether...

-The Hindustan Times Even if opinion polls were to be curbed, the world's largest democracy would still be an exciting place for elections and psephologists alike. Only a little less democratic. So, pollsters have balked at the Election Commission's idea of restricting pre-poll surveys. But that's not the only debate, they say. Some leading Indian pollsters are worried about losing their precious credibility because of a few rotten apples. For one, there...