Governments are censoring digital content on the ground that it infringes intellectual ­property rights or offends people. Can they be stopped? It’s a bit of Iraq and Afghanistan out there on the Internet. Just like the invasion of Iraq was lies, deceit and regime change as George W Bush chased illusory weapons of mass destruction in that hapless country, on the Internet, too, there is an element of fabrication and duplicity...

-The Economic Times   All public data-from that on glacier meltdowns to monsoon charts to benami land--will be freely available at the click of a mouse with the launch of a national data portal next month. Modeled on US chief information officer Vivek Kundra's Data.gov.us project, the science and technology ministry's portal-- data.gov.in--aims to democratize data, and make the government more "open". "We plan to launch data.gov.in by next month. Once the National...

India’s FTAs pip generic drugs production Lot More For Less     * Generic drugs from India play a major role as antiretroviral drugs across the developing world     * A 2010 study says 80% of the medicines used by donor-funded programmes to treat people with HIV were sourced from India     * It’s cut down treatment costs drastically, from $10,000 to $80     * Stronger IP regimes may hamper production of generics *** The right of...

-Express News Service The Tuberculosis Research Centre (TRC) in the city, on Wednesday, announced that it had isolated a molecule that fights both tuberculosis and some strains of HIV. Researchers isolated the molecule from a marine microorganism Streptomyces sp found in soil collected near coral reefs off the Rameshwaram coast. They found that the molecule was effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes most forms of TB. The molecule also acts...

There’s a bogey of news to show the complementary association of Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev on the issue of corruption and black money. It seems as if both of them are fighting the same battle against the Congress-led regime and supplementing each other in their respective struggles. Both of them have emerged as the most visible faces of the contemporary civil society, pressurising the government to take crucial steps...