-The Telegraph Lessons to take away from the two recent calamities in NorthEast It is never easy to rationalise tragedy. The two witnessed recently in the Northeast are no exceptions. One, the Assam floods in which the state’s two major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, and their tributaries wreaked havoc, killing nearly 200 people and, at one point, putting close to 4.5 million people in danger of starvation and disease. Two,...

-The Telegraph Shiv Sena member Priyanka Chaturvedi places a written question about the rise in fake news online The Centre on Thursday said people creating tension in society “in the name of fact-checking” were liable for legal action, a day after efforts to keep fact-checker Mohammed Zubair imprisoned were frustrated in the Supreme Court. Rashtriya Janata Dal member Manoj Jha had asked in the Rajya Sabha why fact-checkers were being arrested while those...

-Down to Earth Police stop farmers from using tube wells to irrigate their fields   India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, appears headed for a drought. Seventy-two of its 75 districts (96 per cent) recorded ‘below normal’ rainfall till July 20, 2022, according to India Meteorological Department (IMD) data. Fifty-nine of the 75 districts recorded ‘extremely low’ rainfall. These districts are suffering a ‘large deficit’, which means they received less than 60 per cent...

-DNA India Between 2013 and 2017, over 4 lakh incidents of illegal mining were reported. The mineral wealth of the country is openly looted by mining mafia. What would you do if some people stole some items from your house? You would immediately go to the police against this and ask the police to find your stolen goods? Any person would do the same. But now imagine if some people steal the mineral...

-Article-14.com The arrests and continued incarceration of fact-checker Mohammad Zubair, political activist Javed Mohammed and the exoneration of 121 Adivasis accused of terrorism are the latest evidence of how the State adopts extra legal methods of dealing with ‘inconvenient citizens’—including journalists, dissidents, activists or the poorest Indians—to push official narratives of conspiracy and terrorism. The common threads: manipulation or egregious misinterpretation of laws, changing accusations, unknown or untraceable complainants and the...