-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: As Nasa satellite images over the past few days show, Punjab is literally on fire. In the images, the state is pockmarked with red dots which correspond to blazes deliberately lit by farmers to get rid of their paddy stubbles after harvest. It's an environmentally disastrous practice that the state government has shown little urgency in tackling. Among the fallout of this mass-burning is smog that spreads...

-The Telegraph The Supreme Court today refused to stay field trials of genetically modified food crops for now despite a court-appointed panel recommending a 10-year moratorium, after the Centre said such a freeze would hit food security for a growing population. The five-member technical expert committee’s (TEC) interim report had advocated the moratorium till the country improved its regulatory system for GM field trials to ensure proper evaluation of these crops’ health,...

-Kafila.org Even though Hiamchal Pradesh voted on November 4, Gujarat has been hogging all the limelight. The election in Gujarat is only in the third week of December. Gujarat captures our political imagination as a ‘role model state’ whereas Hiamchal Pradesh is just in our tourism agenda as a top holiday destination. It is hard for anyone to notice Himachal as a political entity among the big brothers like Uttar Pradesh,...

-The United Nations While citing the rapid development and growth of the Internet, a top United Nations official today urged greater efforts to bridge the ongoing digital divide and ensure that everyone around the world can harness its benefits. There were 2.3 billion Internet users worldwide at the end of 2011, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Wu Hongbo, said in his address to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which...

-Pratirodh.com The fanfare with which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi launched a service delivery scheme in Rajasthan based on the Aadhaar (foundation) unique identity (UID), and celebrated the issue of the first Aadhaar number topping the 200-million mark, should make the Indian National Congress a very worried party indeed—assuming it has a good survival instinct and basic grasp of practical politics.    To put it starkly, the Congress and...