-The Hindu Political parties have acted as judge, jury, supplicant and advocate in their move to amend the RTI Act and exempt themselves from its purview. Their rhetoric on transparency is more hollow than ever A friend called the other day, and said: "I want to congratulate all of you in the RTI community, because you have managed to do what no one, and nothing else has managed to for a long...

-The Hindu The story today is a far cry from the 1960s, when we led the developing countries' fight against the disease Tuberculosis is very much in the news, but for all the wrong reasons - a shortage of drugs; increasing multi-drug and extensive drug resistance (MDR, XDR), making treatment both cumbersome and expensive; total drug resistance (TDR) as a veritable death warrant; popularly used serological tests for diagnosis being declared worse...

-FoodFirst.org NEW YORK CITY-Five innovative grassroots groups from across the globe working for democratic access to land, seeds, water and food have been honored with the 2013 Food Sovereignty Prize, the US Food Sovereignty Alliance announced today. Winners of the fifth annual Food Sovereignty Prize were chosen from among more than 40 inspiring projects creating on-the-ground solutions to hunger and poverty, said the alliance, a network of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental,...

-The Indian Express As the Parliament session begins, it would be interesting to see how the food Bill debate pans out and what the stands parties take say about them. Both the main ideological opponents of the ruling Congress - the BJP and Left - have sounded a discordant note. However, their objections are more perfunctory in nature than anything else. The Left, which had so vehemently pushed the job scheme MNREGS as...

-The Hindustan Times The Narendra Modi government has ‘prima facie' discriminated against the 500-member Sikh community in Kutch, a report by the National Commission for Minorities says. The government had ordered the Sikhs to sell their land and return to Punjab because they were not Gujaratis, citing the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1948. The commission strongly disapproved of the interpretation that only Gujarati farmers could own or buy land in the...