-The Hindu     There is little demonstrated evidence of health benefits from access to ‘improved' stoves and clean fuels Around three billion of the world's poorest people have to burn firewood, animal dung, crop waste and coal to cook food and heat homes, using traditional stoves and open fires. The health-damaging smoke that results is estimated to cause some four million premature deaths each year, principally of women and children. Although many governments, multinational...

-AFP ROME: The UN's food agency on Tuesday said obesity and poor nutrition weigh heavily on the global economy and told governments that investing in food health would bring big economic as well as social returns. Lost productivity and spiralling health care bills linked to malnutrition "could account for as much as five per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP)," equivalent to $3.5 trillion (2.6 trillion euros) a year, the Food...

-Firstpost.com It is becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He seems to surface in the media every time the UPA government is about to legislate its pet follies, providing intellectual succour to mindless spending and corruption wrapped up in the package of anti-poverty schemes. Yesterday, Sen bobbed up just when the UPA - under siege for every known scam in India - tried to start discussions on...

-The Hindu Business Line   Arsenic and fluoride contaminated water has condemned millions to live wasted lives in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Business Line visited several villages in the affected regions for this special report by A. Srinivas. Sixty-nine-year-old Renubala Ari of Deganga village in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district is counting her last days. But it is not her death that worries her. Blind in both eyes and with painful...

-The Indian Express As coming-of-age rituals go, the Tritiya Sammelan Prastuti Committee (TSPC) couldn't have planned it better. Acting on intelligence by its cadre, it moved in on a group of Maoists in Chatra district's Lawalong Tola on the intervening night of March 27-28, killing 10. Among the dead was Lalesh Yadav, secretary of the Bihar-Jharkhand-North Chhattisgarh Special Area Committee, and his closest subordinates, thus leaving a vacuum at the heart...