-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 &NDAsh; Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost &NDAsh; underlines the potential hazards facing...

-The Wall Street Journal   While modern crop engineering faces endless red tape, more slipshod cross-breeding gets a free pass. India has enjoyed signal successes with genetic engineering in agriculture. But today the nation's relationship with this critical biotechnology is in total disarray, the victim of activists' scaremongering and government pandering. Delhi should know better. Following the adoption of the genetically improved varieties and intensive crop management practices of the Green Revolution, from 1960...

-The Hindu A recent survey in the Sunderbans region of West Bengal reveals an alarming trend of rising mental health problem among women Everyday, when Badal, a sturdy young man of Sunderbans returns home at dusk, he finds his mother, Kamala, sitting placidly in the veraNDAh, staring into the distance with strangely unseeing eyes. The house, otherwise, is abuzz with activity. His daughter is bringing in the cows, his sons are clamouring...

-Outlook Shillong: A daily labourer hailing from Assam was allegedly stoned to death and another labourer seriously injured after he was beaten up near here, police said today. On November 20, three labourers (two from Assam) were abducted from their work place at Mawlai in the outskirt of the city by some people, who whisked them away in a taxi to an isolated spot at Umbir village near the scenic Umiam lake,...

-The Telegraph Srinagar: If appetite for capital punishment has been whetted in the country, Padshah Begum’s experience today should serve as a timely note of caution. The 60-year-old lady in Srinagar received word this afternoon that Delhi High Court has taken her son off death row because “serious lapses” marked the police investigation into a blast in the capital in 1996. She is no stranger to such news: two years ago, her eldest...