-IANS   Custodial killings, police abuse including torture, and failure to implement policies aimed at protecting vulnerable communities marred India's record in 2011, according to the Human Rights Watch World Report. The global report released on Monday pointed out that immunity for abuses committed by security forces also continued, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast, and areas facing Maoist insurgency. However, the report found that killings by the Border Security Force (BSF)...

Questionable drug trials on mentally challenged persons by doctors in Indore emphasise the need for strict enforcement of medical ethics. IN what appears to be a page out of Robin Cook's medical thriller, government and private doctors in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, reportedly carried out clinical trials of various medicines on some 233 patients who had gone to them seeking psychiatric treatment. As in Cook's famous book Coma, in which a medical...

-DD News   In a damning action, government has barred former ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair and three eminent space scientists from any re-employment for their alleged role in the controversial allocation of scarce S-band space segment to private firm Devas. The action, probably the first of its kind against a former Secretary-level technocrat and other retired officials, follows a high-level inquiry into the controversial deal under which Antrix was to lease out...

-PTI   Taking action in the controversial Antrix-Devas deal, government has barred former ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair and three other eminent space scientists from holding any government jobs. The action comes in the wake of the controversial deal in which a private company was allotted scarce S band spectrum by ISRO allegedly in violation of rules. Besides Nair, K Bhaskaranarayana, former scientific secretary at ISRO, K R SRIdharamurthi, former managing director of Antrix,...

-Express News Service   An engineer accused in the UP National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam was found shot through the head in his Lucknow home this morning. This is the fourth accused in the scam to have died under unusual circumstances. In an apparent “suicide note” left behind on the living room sofa close to where the body was found, Sunil Kumar Verma, an assistant engineer with the Construction and Design Services...