-The United Nations Massive stores of carbon trapped under the northern hemisphere’s frozen expanses risk being unleashed and significantly contributing to global warming should thawing of the region’s permafrost continue to accelerate, a United Nations report warned today. Released on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference in the Qatari capital of Doha, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report – Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost – underlines the potential hazards facing...

-The Hindu The intention behind the move to make the CAG a multimember body is not to activate the Shunglu Committee’s report but a desire to clip the auditor’s wings During the last few days there have been many comments on the report that the government of India was considering a proposal to make the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) a multimember body. The move has been widely seen as...

-The Times of India The death of Savita Halappanavar may have made Ireland the target of international criticism. A review of laws across the globe, however, indicates that the 'unusually restrictive' abortion law is not unique to the Catholic country. When it comes to termination of pregnancy, the world doesn't seem to be fair. More than half of the countries for which information was available don't allow abortion even in the case...

-Business World Wind, water and the sun can help India cut dependence on coal and gas For India, energy security has never seemed more real, more urgent than now. Forty per cent of the country’s 1.2-billion populace is yet to have access to electricity. Even those getting grid supply suffer poor quality of power. Towns see power cuts more than half the day. The country’s energy deficit, according to the Central Electricity...

-IANS WASHINGTON: The sea level is rising faster than expected and may cross one metre mark by the end of this century -- double that of the estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, says a study. "What's missing from the models used to forecast sea-level rise are critical feedbacks that speed everything up," says Bill Hay, a geologist at the University of Colorado, US. The feedbacks include...