-The Times of India A fact-finding team of 21 rights groups alleged that joint forces comprising CRPF and state police "killed 17 villagers in cold blood" at Sarkeguda on June 28. "It was plain slaughter that night near Sarkeguda," said Asish Gupta, convener of Coordination of Democratic Rights Organizations (CDRO) on Wednesday. The team visited the encounter site at Sarkeguda on July 6 and 7. Speaking to reporters, Gupta said, "There were no...

-The Telegraph The Centre is planning to hold a comprehensive workshop for tribal women in Jharkhand to make them more alert to the menace of human trafficking, the decision mirroring its concern over the rise in number of such victims from the state. Krishna Tirath, Union minister of women and child development who met Jharkhand Women’s Commission member Vasavi Kiro in Delhi today, said the workshop would be held sometime in August-September...

-The Hindu Journalists need to adopt a set of integrity measures in order to police the boundaries between the market and political power   Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and the world’s wealthiest woman, is seeking three board seats following her purchase of 18.7 per cent of Fairfax which owns most papers in Australia not controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. There has already been considerable upheaval in two of the Fairfax papers...

-The Indian Express In 2000, when Sutia village of West Bengal was virtually ruled by alleged rapists, a young schoolteacher stood up to them, starting a movement that helped villagers overcome their fear. Villagers say the gangsters, primarily extortionists, had punished a number of reluctant donors by gang-raping the women of their homes, often in front of the rest of the family. The fear this created had stamped out any hopes of...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...