-AFP Child victims of sex assaults in India often find themselves humiliated by the police and mistreated by doctors when they pluck up the courage to report abuse, Human Rights Watch said Thursday. In a report released amid continuing anger at the handling of sex cases in the wake of a deadly gang rape in Delhi, the rights watchdog said the authorities had to become more sensitive towards victims. "Children who bravely complain...

-Outlook Viewing with concern incidents of acid attacks, the Supreme Court today directed the Centre to convene in six weeks a meeting of Chief Secretaries of all states and Union Territories to address the menace and discuss FRAming of a law for treatment and compensation to victims. Not satisfied with the steps taken by the Centre to regulate sale of acid and to curb its use for attacking women, a bench headed...

-IPS News Officials at the World Bank are forcefully rejecting a new internal evaluation that is highly critical of the institution’s decade-long forest policy, expressing their “strong disagreement” with some assertions in the report. The assessment, written by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), the World Bank Group’s auditor, warns that expectations for poverty reduction as envisioned in the bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy “have not yet been met”. The report is particularly critical...

-The Hindu They will be involved in the exercise in panchayats other than their own Chennai: Beneficiaries of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) are going to be involved in carrying out social audit of works of the MGNREGS from April 1. To ensure that there is no conflict of interest, they will be engaged in the audit of village panchayats other than theirs. For each village panchayat, five persons...

-Counterpunch.org     “The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class.”     BR Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah, 1943, Delhi. I. Arrest. States are clumsy with their enormous power. When it suits the modern state, it uses it immense apparatus to constraint those who make claims upon it or who say things that denigrate this or that section of society. A college professor in West Bengal draws a cartoon of...