-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court order upholding a 153-year-old law that effectively criminalises gay sex has ignored scientific evidence that homosexuality is not deviant in any sense, but merely a variation in human sexual behaviour, experts and lawyers have said. The court has virtually "brushed aside" submissions by medical experts that homosexuality is not a mental health disorder and should not be viewed as a criminal activity, said lawyers...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: An Indian government laboratory released a formulation of salt fortified with iodine and iron for mass consumption, calling it a tool to combat anaemia and iodine deficiency, without adequate and rigorous evidence to show that it increases blood haemoglobin levels, scientists have said. The National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), Hyderabad, has shared the formulation and production technology for its double fortified salt (DFS) with seven salt-producing companies, some...

-Frontline Childhood TB has been neglected for decades, but in the past few years the WHO has begun to realise its real impact in terms of incidence, prevalence and mortality. THE number of annual new tuberculosis (TB) cases in India has been nearly 2.2 million for the past couple of years. Many of these infected people would have been in contact with children aged under five years before being diagnosed and,...

-The Telegraph Lucknow: The laptops are piling, the classrooms are empty. The Akhilesh Yadav-led Uttar Pradesh government today indicated it was ready to shift gears and focus on tackling alarming school dropout rates after being slammed over misplaced priorities and cash-guzzling populist schemes like free laptops. The issue was raised by a Congress legislator, Pramod Tiwari. BJP MLAs soon followed suit, drawing the government’s attention to the large number of dropouts at the...

-The Hindu Shimla: The people of Sutlej valley have rejected the draft study report on the cumulative environment impact on the river basin presented by the Indian Council for Forestry Research and Education, Dehradun, on behalf of the Himachal Pradesh government. Local representatives and environmentalists said over the weekend that a month's notice should have been given for the public consultation after sharing the executive summary of the environment impact assessment (EIA)...