-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 New York Times blog You could be pardoned for thinking that light pollution is someone’s idea of a Diwali joke. With concerns about rising air pollution hanging over India’s capital like the thick blanket of smog that appeared a few weeks ago and activists against noise pollution jostling to be heard over the burst of holiday firecrackers, the relatively benign problem of light pollution may not seem too important. But astronomers in...

-The Indian Express The number of polio cases worldwide reached a record low in 2012, giving experts confidence that the disease can finally be eradicated, according to presentations made at a major US conference. Just 177 cases were recorded globally through October 2012, down from 502 during the same period last year, said virologists attending the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Atlanta. But the experts said...

-The Telegraph When the going gets cold, the comrades will get going. In the winter chill of December and January, leaders of the four Left parties, including CPM general secretary Prakash Karat and his CPI counterpart Sudhakar Reddy, would go from house to house to collect signatures. Their target: five crore signatures in favour of a universal public distribution system (PDS) to ensure food security for the poor and also the relatively affluent. While...

-Mirror News Tax row coffee chain pays 'poverty wages' despite making £222 million profit in three months TAX row coffee chain Starbucks is paying workers just 25p an hour at its newly-opened stores in India. The pittance falls far below the country’s official living wage and means some staff earn less in a day than the price of the ­cheapest cup of Starbucks coffee in the UK. Details of the wages emerged as the...