Before the break of dawn, they began to queue up. By the time the two polling booths, adjoining each other, opened, more than half of Netai had assembled to cast, perhaps, the vote of their lifetime. The young and the old, the landed and the landless, the men and women; they were all there to avenge the killing of nine unarmed villagers five months ago by the Harmads - an...

Tihar jail today has the largest collection of charged or convicted top officials, a powerful ex-minister, sundry politicians and officials. Maharashtra had a teflon-coated chief minister who was ‘sacked’ to a cabinet post in Delhi after being long untouched by many scandals. Another just exited. A former Jharkhand chief minister is in jail on charges of looting his state treasury and accumulating funds abroad. The powerful founder of the Nationalist...

Haryana records the lowest adult sex ratio in the country, and its Jhajjar district has the worst adult and child sex ratios. THE results of the provisional Census revealed that Haryana as a whole registered the lowest adult sex ratio in the country and also had the lowest child sex ratio (CSR). Among the State's districts, Jhajjar recorded the lowest adult as well as child sex ratio, and within the district,...

Bangladesh's highest court on Thursday upheld the government's decision to remove Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus from his pioneering small loan agency Grameen Bank. The ruling ends his decades of leadership at the bank he set up to lend money to the poor. A panel led by Chief Justice A B M Khairul Haque said the appeal to keep Yunus as managing director of the bank is dismissed. Yunus has said his removal was...

Endosulfan, a powerful 50-year-old insecticide sometimes called DDT’s “cousin,” was officially banned last week at an international pesticides meeting in Geneva. Partial exemptions were created for India, however; the chemical may be used on some crops there for up to 10 years. Many countries outlawed endosulfan long ago because it is dangerous to farmworkers, accumulates in the body, kills beneficial insects and persists in the environment. The United States is an...