The minorities and Dalits, who constitute 40 per cent of the Telangana [ Images ] population, are now saying that they will prefer to remain in a united Andhra Pradesh rather than have a Telangana which is controlled by "communal forces", reports Vicky Nanjappa. There can be no two thoughts over the fact that the Telangana movement has been the biggest challenge for the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh. Till the...

-The Telegraph   A student was stabbed and injured last night as violence flared at Osmania University over a “beef festival” organised by Dalit students to assert their right to eat their traditional food on the campus. The government, worried that the issue may snowball and re-ignite the Telangana movement at its epicentre, has swamped the campus with paramilitary and police who caned the fighting students and fired tear gas. Still, skirmishes continued...

-The Hindustan Times Dalit students’ assertion of the right to eat beef — a tradition in Andhra Pradesh — triggered a riot with the right wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activists at Osmania University in Hyderabad on Sunday. Even after the overnight clash that left five persons injured and two vehicles torched was brought under control, the campus — a hotbed of the Telangana statehood movement — remained tense on Monday. The...

-The Times of India   The city police have launched a manhunt for four persons belonging to the Hindu community who they suspect triggered the communal disturbances in Old City last Sunday by hurling a piece of beef on the walls of the Hanuman Temple at Kurmaguda in Madannapet. All the four are residents of Kurmaguda and in their late twenties, police said, and claimed that the accused would be nabbed within...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...