-IANS   Azamgarh: Amid the mushrooming convent schools, mosques still continue to be popular centres of learning at least up to the primary class level in Uttar Pradesh's Azamgarh district. The trend is more common in cities and towns where Islamic primary schools are rare. There are more than 100 mosques in Azamgarh city and around 40 per cent offer primary education. A majority of students in mosques come from the Muslim community...

It is getting harder for jobseekers to return to gainful employment and for new entrants to find adequate jobs, says the ILO. THERE is little in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) annual projection of job growth to cheer about. The year 2012 has been described as a year of stark reality. A third of the global workforce is currently unemployed or poor; that is, 200 million members of the 3.3-billion-strong global...

West Bengal: An agrarian crisis looms over the State as farmers commit suicide in spite of a bumper crop. THE topic of suicide figured repeatedly in Safar Molla's conversations with his neighbours a few days before his death. The 18-year-old marginal farmer from Kaltikuri village in Bardhaman district's Bhatar block talked about it quite casually, in fact even jocularly. Everybody in the village knew he was up to his neck in...

Mohammad Aamir had just turned 18, when one February day in 1998, he was ambushed by a police van. A month later, he found himself thrown against the cold, forbidding walls of a prison cell in the capital's Tihar jail. The charges were murder, terrorism and waging war against the nation. Aamir, released in January this year after 14 years, was named the main accused in 20 low-intensity bomb blasts executed...

In an extraordinary effort at resolving policy disputes, the Union food ministry pleaded before the Supreme Court on Thursday to order the Planning Commission to release funds for reforms in the Public Distribution System (PDS) and to order the rural development ministry to provide details of how many people in the category of poorest of poor had been left out of PDS.  In its affidavit filed in court, the ministry also accused...