-The Hindu The Supreme Court on Thursday restored the right of complainant and survivor Zakia Jafri to access all documents related to the SIT investigation that were submitted to the Supreme Court between May 2010 and July-August 2011 to enable her to file her protest petition against the SIT's closure report exonerating Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 61 others. A three-Judge Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam, Aftab Alam and Ranjana Desai directed...

-Express India Lucknow: An RTI activist, who was also the headmaster in a government primary school, was shot dead by unidentified men in Mohammadabad police station area of Farrukhabad district on Thursday. The victim, Anand Prakash Rajput (42), had used RTI to get information which he used to get three teachers dismissed from service for getting jobs on the basis of forged documents and the process of dismissal of three other teachers...

-Down to Earth Only 25 days of work provided per family as against the guaranteed 100 days of work; wages paid late in 55 per cent cases District administrations in rural West Bengal are resorting to innovative ways in their hurry to spend funds allocated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (MNREGS). In the Maoist-affected West Midnapore district, petty contractors are doing the earth work earmarked for MNREGS with...

-The Times of India BANGALORE: Karnataka is now home to 6,072 Asiatic elephants, 5,945 of which were spotted in the Mysore elephant reserve (MER) alone, according to the latest elephant census. The Karnataka Elephant Census 2012, conducted by the state forest department in May last year and carried out by the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, showed an increase in the state's elephant population since 2010 when their number stood at 5,800. The...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...