I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

The Election Commission feels that the situation in Bengal is “worse than anticipated” and that the ground realities necessitate “an exclusive plan of action” for conducting the Assembly elections this year, according to sources. The commission made the observations after going through a report submitted by a six-member team that visited the state last week. The “exclusive plan of action” will have a bearing on the number of phases for the elections,...

Unfazed by opposition attacks and questions from the Supreme Court, government on Tuesday maintained that it cannot disclose information received from foreign entities on black money held by Indians abroad because of absence of legal framework. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, however, dismissed opposition criticism that it was not disclosing information because such disclosure could result in the government's fall. "Let us understand the issue. No information can be made available unless there...

Fast-growing emerging nations are taking increasingly aggressive actions to beat back rising food prices as they grow more worried of threats to stability if prices don't start to retreat. Developing-market governments have unveiled a laundry list of measures—including price caps, export bans and rules to counter commodity speculation—to keep food costs from disrupting their economies as price spikes that some had hoped were temporary have stretched into the new year. Some...

The year 2010 ranked as the warmest on record – together with 2005 and 1998 – according to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which added that last year also witnessed a large number of extreme weather events, including the heat wave in Russia and the devastating floods in Pakistan. In 2010, the global average temperature was 0.53 degrees Celsius (0.95 degrees Fahrenheit) above the mean for the period from...