The Union Minister for Personnel Prithviraj Chavan said that there was no question of bringing in an amendment in the Right to Information Act without consulting the people. Speaking to a delegation of National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI) at his office on Monday, Mr Chavan assured the delegates that a final decision on the nature of amendments has not been taken as yet. Chavan said that he...

Broadcasters attending the United Nations-backed fourth World Electronic Media Forum (WEMF 4) have called for sustained and concrete global action to address the murder of journalists in peacetime and in war. “Most journalists are killed not in war zones but in their own countries as they try to shine the light of the truth into the darkest recesses of their societies,” they said in a declaration adopted unanimously at the...

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon intends to join a 24-hour fast over the weekend on the eve of the World Summit on Food Security in solidarity with the planet’s one billion people who do not have enough to eat, his spokesperson said today. Mr. Ban will deliver a speech at the opening of the three-day summit in Rome on Monday in which he is expected to say that it is unacceptable that...

An astonishing 200 million children under the age of five, almost all in Africa and Asia, suffer from the debilitating impact of stunted growth resulting from a lack of food and the right nutrients, a new United Nations report warned today. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition, also Stressed that undernutrition contributes to a third of deaths of all children under five each year,...

Huge investments, the emergence of media conglomerates and their explosive growth have brought into focus new considerations that guide professional media decisions, Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Hamid Ansari said here on Wednesday. “Today, the demands of professional journalists are carefully balanced with the interests of owners and stakeholders of media companies and their cross media interests. The interplay of these conflicting demands is evident and [a] subject of...