-The Hindu The Supreme Court on Tuesday pulled up the Centre for its callousness in not enacting a law to ban manual scavenging despite giving repeated assurances that it would soon amend the relevant Act. Earlier, Additional Solicitor General Harin Raval told a Bench of Justices H.L. Dattu and C.K. Prasad that the Cabinet note was ready for bringing amendments to the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition)...

-The Telegraph Fareed Zakaria, long thought of by New Delhi’s leadership as the first American secretary of state of Indian origin in the future, fell from grace yesterday when Time suspended his column in the weekly magazine for plagiarism. CNN, where Zakaria is a star Sunday morning international affairs television host, followed suit with a statement that he wrote a blog post on CNN.com “which included similar unattributed excerpts. That blog post...

-The Times of India India's official unemployment rate last year was 3.8%, data released recently by the Labour Bureau shows, but, as always, averages hide many stories. A closer look at the numbers shows that unemployment rises with education level to 10% among graduates, and higher still for backward castes. The Chandigarh-based Labour Bureau under the union ministry of labour and employment released the 'Employment and Unemployment Survey 2012' last week. The...

Tuberculosis re-emerges as a major threat as new drug-resistant strains develop because of mismanagement of the disease. At the beginning of the year, doctors at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre reported that they had 12 patients infected with TDR-TB, or totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, a condition in which the TB bacilli is resistant to all first- and second-line drugs used in the conventional treatment of the disease. Panic...

-The Hindu A petition submitted to Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairperson, NCERT Textbooks Review Committee, by leading Dalit and non-Dalit writers, scholars and activists. When NCERT's Class XI Political Science textbook, Indian Constitution at Work , came to the attention of some Dalit activists, they objected to the manner in which the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, had been depicted riding a snail representing the Constitution, with...