Amit Kumar, an Indian journalist based in the eastern state of Bihar, received a tip in 2009 from a village called Manan Bigha just two kilometers away from his home. There was a man there dying from starvation, he was told. The situation was urgent. Mr. Kumar rushed off to visit the man, Kangresh Manjhi, and exhaustively documented his story. He learned how Mr. Manjhi, a lower-caste, landless laborer, was forced...

-The Times of India   The city police have launched a manhunt for four persons belonging to the Hindu community who they suspect triggered the communal disturbances in Old City last Sunday by hurling a piece of beef on the walls of the Hanuman Temple at Kurmaguda in Madannapet. All the four are residents of Kurmaguda and in their late twenties, police said, and claimed that the accused would be nabbed within...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

The attack on corruption should not turn into disregard and contempt for institutions. The educated middle class in India is naturally exercised over the corruption that is widely prevalent in public life. With growing concern over corruption there is growing indignation. This indignation is expressed on various public occasions, sometimes passionately, but often in a purely routine manner. Every public institution and every public office, civil as well as military, is...

-The Times of India   That’s what it appears. Just yesterday (11 April 2012) there were two powerful quakes off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, and two more in Mexico. In recent memory, there have been massive earthquakes in Japan last year (which caused the tsunami and the Fukushima meltdown), in Chile and Haiti in 2010, in Samoa and Sumatra in 2009, in China in 2008 and so on. But it's not true...