The arrest of Suresh Kalmadi on 25 April marked yet another scene in the prolonged drama surrounding the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in October 2010. Yet the general media focus on Kalmadi may have served to distract attention from the many other acts of omission and commission that mark the sordid history of that extravagantly planned and deeply flawed public show. In these other actions, there are stories of funds...

For the first time, SHO also identified as one of the alleged perpetrators of crime The trial in the case was shifted to the Rohini Sessions Court last December ‘Families of the accused are threatening witnesses with dire consequences' Kamla, whose physically challenged daughter and husband were killed in the Mirchpur caste violence case in which 18 Dalit houses were also burnt in April last year, has identified 81 of the 98 accused...

Senior United Nations officials today stressed the need to promote the participation of women in decision-making, noting that democracy and gender equality are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. “While women’s political participation improves democracy, the reverse is also true: democracy is an incubator for gender equality,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks at a roundtable held at UN Headquarters on gender equality and democracy. “It provides public space for discussion of human...

As joint owners of the national response to HIV/AIDS, civil society groups have called upon the government to take proactive steps to meaningfully involve civil society in all aspects of conceptualisation, design, planning and implementation of National AIDS Control Programme-IV. They also want the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) to put in place transparent mechanisms to inform civil society of the process in the run-up to the planning and development...

The upsurge in the use of the toxic pesticide endosulfan, targeted for prohibition by the international community, illustrates one of the dilemmas of intensive agriculture in Argentina and Latin America in general. "There is always a natural solution," insists farmer Alicia Alem, a member of an Argentine cooperative that produces cereal and forage crops without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. "In terms of wheat, for example, the cooperative gets exactly the same yield...