-The Hindustan Times Children’s Day coinciding with Diabetes Day now has an ominous ring to it. One in every four children under 18 being diagnosed with diabetes in urban India has type-2 diabetes, which typically affects only adults in their 50s and 60s and is caused by an unhealthy lifestyle. Five years ago, adult-onset diabetes affected one in 10 children diagnosed with the disease, while almost no cases were reported a...

-The New York Times blog You could be pardoned for thinking that light pollution is someone’s idea of a Diwali joke. With concerns about rising air pollution hanging over India’s capital like the thick blanket of smog that appeared a few weeks ago and activists against noise pollution jostling to be heard over the burst of holiday firecrackers, the relatively benign problem of light pollution may not seem too important. But astronomers in...

-The Hindustan Times As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his team pull out all stops to  shake off criticism of policy paralysis with a string of reform measures, rising prices and sliding growth continue to remain key worries. A Hindustan Times survey, one of the largest of its kind covering 28,395 respondents across 13 cities, shows nearly two in three (62.7%) of the people surveyed said that high food prices were hurting...

-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: As Nasa satellite images over the past few days show, Punjab is literally on fire. In the images, the state is pockmarked with red dots which correspond to blazes deliberately lit by farmers to get rid of their paddy stubbles after harvest. It's an environmentally disastrous practice that the state government has shown little urgency in tackling. Among the fallout of this mass-burning is smog that spreads...

-Mainstream Weekly Dr Binayak Sen, an internationally renowned medical practitioner and social activist (a leading figure in the People’s Union for Civil Liberties), was incarcerated in Chhattisgarh and held in detention in Raipur having been branded as a Maoist for his activities in defence of poor tribals in the State. He is now out on bail. The following is the text of the Arvind Narayan Das Memorial Lecture he delivered in...