-BBC At least 17 people have died after drinking tainted home-made alcohol over the weekend in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, officials say. More than 20 people are also being treated in hospital in the state's Krishna district. Deaths from illicit alcohol are not uncommon in India, as licensed liquor is often too expensive for the poor. In December, at least 169 people died after drinking toxic alcohol in West Bengal state. Protests The...

-Associated Press   Bootleg liquor containing toxic methanol killed 143 people and sickened dozens more who drank the cheap, illicit brew bought at small shops in West Bengal, officials said Thursday. Police arrested 10 suspected bootleggers. Emergency medical teams rushed to the village outside Kolkata, and thousands of relatives, many of them wailing in grief, gathered outside the packed hospital. Inside, dead bodies lay on the floor covered in quilts, while the ill...

NEARLY 80 km from Pune is Ralegan Siddhi village with about 3,000 people. It would have been one among the hundreds of nondescript villages in Parner taluk of Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, had it not been for Kisan Baburao Hazare, 71, better known as Anna, or older brother, a title that was appended to his name after he made the village more than just a dot on the map. Until he was...

Hazare is now fighting possibly the biggest battle of his life, by launching an indefinite hunger strike in New Delhi to press for an early enactment of a Lokpal Bill, legislation that would create public ombudsmen to investigate corruption charges against public servants Anna Hazare is a veteran of many battles—as a former soldier and then as a social activist who has forced at least half a dozen Maharashtra ministers to...

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...