-The Business Standard   Young women in India are much better off than their mothers, but they fare much worse than their counterparts in many developing countries when it comes to the physical survival rate of women and participation in labour force, says a report by the World Bank. The World Development Report titled ‘Gender Equality and Development’ looks at gender inequality as not just a moral but also an economic issue. The report...

-Express News Service   Taking over the investigations into the Gopalgarh riots, the CBI on Wednesday registered five FIRs in the case. The investigating agency has constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by an SP for an expeditious probe into the case.   A CBI spokesperson said the agency took over the investigations following a request from the Rajasthan government. A CBI team, accompanied by forensics experts, visited Bharatpur last week and collected...

A five-year effort to promote condom use by sex workers and their clients and the use of safe needles by drug users may have helped India prevent about 100,000 HIV infections, according to a study to be released tomorrow. The study suggests that the high-profile HIV prevention initiative called Avahan, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented in six states, was less effective in Nagaland, Manipur and Maharashtra...

-AP   An estimated 100,000 people in India may have escaped HIV infection over five years thanks to one of the world’s biggest prevention programmes, an encouraging sign that targeting high-risk groups remains vital even as more donors focus on treatment, a new study suggests. While the initial findings regarding the $258 million Avahan project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, come with large uncertainty due to data limitations and methodology,...

-The Economic Times   The government on Tuesday said it would confer constitutional status on the proposed Lokpal , embracing the idea mooted by Rahul Gandhi.  "We are working on a very strong Lokpal bill. A Lokpal bill that will come with a constitutional amendment . That amendment will give the Lokpal the status of a constitutional authority," law minister Salman Khurshid told PTI on Tuesday.  Khurshid, who gave Rahul the credit for the...