-PTI Vedanta group is likely to close its one million tonnes alumina refinery at Odisha's Lanjigarh from Wednesday, a move which would impact about 7,000 jobs in the Eastern state. The mining conglomerate, which runs the alumina refinery through an unlisted subsidiary, Vedanta Aluminium Ltd (VAL), had given a closure notice to the state government three months back citing severe shortage of bauxite as the primary reason for the shutdown. "Suspension of operations...

-Agence France-Presse Nekpur: With both hands holding the basket of human excrement on her head, widowed grandmother Kela walks through a stream of sewage, up a mound of waste and then dumps the filth while cursing. "Nobody even pays us a decent wage!" she spits as she rakes mud and rubbish over her newly deposited pile, one of several she drops in the course of her working day cleaning toilets as a...

-IANS LUCKNOW: A city lawyer and social activist on Sunday lodged a first information report (FIR) against popular social networking site Facebook, after his profile was blocked. The report was filed at the 'cyber crime cell' of the Lucknow police by Prince Lenin, a resident of Hussainganj here. In his complaint, Lenin alleged that although he had long been a user of Facebook, his profile was recently blocked by the site without so...

-The Economic Times After Mahatma Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh is the only national leader to be genuinely concerned that 65 years after Independence, some 600 million Indians in the 21st century continue to use open skies as their latrines. While Lee Kuan Yew continues to exhort Singaporeans to have cleaner loos, our ministry of railways thinks depositing human excreta all along the country's length and breadth, including deep into the cities -...

-The Hindu Sequence of attacks on “well-known business units” suggests violence was not spontaneous Last week’s violence in Faizabad district during the Durga Puja procession which left two persons dead, several injured and dozens of shops razed, was executed in a planned manner and the targets had been selected, according to a fact-finding team and accounts by victims and eyewitnesses. The fact-finding team of human rights organisation Rihai Manch said the sequence of...