A court judgment delivered earlier this year holds important lessons for those engaged in investigating and fighting terrorism. Questioning the methods of terror investigation is always a challenge because it is so easily seen as defending the enemies of the nation. The exercise is monumentally difficult after a benumbing bomb attack — especially if it has been judged to be the work of a home-grown Islamist organisation. The raging anger at this...

India’s domestic wheat prices higher than international rates by around $100 per tonne; traders seek subsidy India’s food ministry will oppose a proposal to export wheat as it prefers to distribute the excess to the poor within the country, K.V. Thomas, Union minister of state (independent charge) for consumer affairs, food and public distribution, said on Thursday. “We want the wheat produced by our farmers to be distributed here first,” Thomas said,...

Terming the Right to Education Act as an "attack" on the sovereignty of madarsas and other minority institutions, Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband today said it will oppose it. "The seminary will strongly protest the move to snatch rights of madarsas through RTE and it is with the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which is already opposing it," newly-appointed vice-chancellor Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani told PTI. He said the Act poses...

Lucknow Many officials passed through the UP Family Welfare Department between 2009-11, the period during which there were massive irregularities in the National Rural Health Mission in the state, as confirmed by a recent review by a Central team. However, one official stayed at the top all along — Pradeep Shukla, a 1981-batch IAS officer, the Principal Secretary of Family Welfare, later also appointed the Mission Director of NRHM. So even...

-The United Nations   A former Brazilian food security minister will become the first person from Latin America to head the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations agency leading international efforts in the fight against hunger. José Graziano da Silva, who has served as a senior regional official for FAO since 2006, will take up the post of Director-General on 1 January next year after beating five other candidates during...