Eighty labourers, both men and women, are at work at Thiruvanduthurai village in Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu, about 325 km south of Chennai. They are digging a pond - about an acre wide and six feet deep - funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or MGNREGS. Outside the work perimeter, two middle aged men look on, worried. P. Murugan and K. Govindaraj are farmers from the...

A 50-year-old man, allegedly associated with a city-based builder, has been arrested for threatening an RTI activist - who was the first to expose the Adarsh scam - police said today. Danny Abraham, who is said to be associated with a builder involved in Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) redevelopment project, was arrested last night following an argument with RTI activist Santosh Daundkar. Abraham has been booked under sections 341 (wrongful restraint), 336...

A group of tribal women has declared a “ban” on the sale and consumption of Liquor, while warning of imposing a hefty penalty on those defying the “prohibition” in Madhya Pradesh's Talanpur village. Fed up with husbands “who get drunk and beat up their wives, apart from wasting hard-earned money,” the women in the village, about 180 km from here, have come together under the banner of ‘Mahila Samiti,' led by...

It's the land of freedom, of bright lights and burgers, where daring entrepreneurs arrive from across the planet in search of fame and fortune. The United States of America - the world's melting pot - has been a symbol of hope for centuries, but behind this vision of wealth and wonder is a tale often untold. Food security, lack of water rights and unemployment might sound like the type of problems...

Deforestation, poachers, illicit Liquor-brewers forcing them to migrate Large-scale deforestation and the disturbances caused by poachers and illicit Liquor-brewers could be forcing king cobras to migrate from their natural habitat in bamboo-rich dense evergreen forests to villages nearby. A study conducted by the researchers of the Department of Zoology, University of Kerala, and the Reptile Study Group, Thiruvananthapuram, has revealed that the king cobra, the world's longest venomous snake, is under...