The year 2010 ranked as the warmest on record – together with 2005 and 1998 – according to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which added that last year also Witnessed a large number of extreme weather events, including the heat wave in Russia and the devastating floods in Pakistan. In 2010, the global average temperature was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the mean for the period from...

Protests and black flags greeted the eight-member team from the European Union who arrived in Raipur on Sunday night. The EU delegation, which include representatives of Delhi based diplomatic missions from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden and the UK, has come to Witness human rights activist Binayak Sen's bail hearing. The hearing is scheduled to take place at the Chhattisgarh High Court in Bilaspur on Monday. They were accompanied by BJP's own...

Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

A Delhi court has summoned Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) of India Vinod Rai to appear before it on February 5 as a Witness on a complaint by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy, seeking the prosecution of the former Telecom Minister, A. Raja, in the 2G spectrum allocation scam. Special CBI Judge Pradeep Chaddah also asked another CAG official, R.P. Singh, to appear at the Tis Hazari court on that day to...

Controversies surrounding the two real estate projects, the Adarsh Society building in Mumbai and the Lavasa city near Pune, bring to the fore the huge costs of poor enforcement of town planning rules and inept administration of urban development. In the case of Adarsh housing, a 31-storeyed apartment building raised in the Backbay reclamation area and meant for Kargil heroes, the Maharashtra government not only turned a blind eye to...