The Supreme Court today asked central vigilance commissioner P.J. Thomas to explain why his appointment as head of the country’s top anti-corruption watchdog shouldn’t be scrapped even as the embattled bureaucrat hung on to his post. The notices to Thomas and the central government were a first from the court, which had so far only questioned Thomas’s appointment as CVC for his alleged involvement in a palm oil import case. The vigilance...

The Kerala government has decided to detoxify' Kasaragod district which has been bearing the brunt of indiscriminate spraying of the highly toxic endosulfan in cashew plantations for the last two decades. All highly toxic Red and Yellow categories of pesticides, including endosulfan, will be banned in the district and the soil and water bodies will be frequently monitored for pesticide content to enable remedial measures, state agriculture minister Mullakkara Retnakaran told...

List silent on charge sheet against CVC Thomas in palmolein case The Centre has informed the Supreme Court that sanction for prosecution is awaited in 126 cases registered under the Prevention of Corruption Act against various public servants including Justice Nirmal Yadav of the Uttarakhand High Court, who has been given a clean chit in the Rs.15-lakh cash-at-door scam during her tenure as judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. On...

Wider access to anti-retroviral therapy reduced AIDS casualties Children account for 3.5 % of all infections Even though the overall HIV infection prevalence rate has shown a 50 per cent decline during the past decade in India, among the States, Manipur continues to top the list with an adult prevalence of 1.40 per cent, followed by Andhra Pradesh (0.90 per cent), Mizoram (0.81 per cent) and Nagaland at (0.78 per cent). It...

The issues relating to the victims of endosulfan, sprayed in the plantations of Kasargod district in Kerala, have snowballed once again. “Earthworms emerged from the soil, and, subsequently, died. Then birds came to eat the earthworms and they died as well.”   “Some termites were killed in a cotton farm sprayed with endosulfan. A frog fed on the dead termites, and was immobilised a few minutes later. An owl which flew over...