-PTI Bowing to opposition pressure, the government on announced a time-bound inquiry by a retired judge into reports of lobbying by retail giant Walmart to gain entry into India. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath made the announcement as soon as the Lok Sabha met for the day. “Government will appoint a retired judge to hold a time-bound inquiry into the media reports regarding Walmart,” Mr. Nath said. The issue of retail giant Walmart lobbying...

—New York Times News Service    Documents uncovered at the Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh where 112 workers died in a fire two weeks ago indicate that not one but two U.S. apparel makers supplying goods for Wal-Mart were using the factory around the time of the fire. Two days after the Nov. 24 fire, Wal-Mart said in a statement that it had stopped authorising production at Tazreen and that despite that move,...

-The Hindu Convinced that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) installation is safe, the French government recently granted the fusion project the necessary permission to start construction in Cadarache. There are many firsts to the project. Maintaining transparency has been one of ITER’s most significant features and organising an enquiry to give the public an opportunity to formulate its opinion has set a new benchmark for openness. Independent experts assessed the...

-The Hindu Rural newspaper Gaon Connection, recently launched in Uttar Pradesh, seeks to project the hinterland as it really is For long the national media has been accused of shutting its door on rural news. And by now, the largely city-centric media has won the argument too that news about villages and small towns just do not bring them the advertisers. So we are in an age when the ‘business of media’...

-The Indian Express Steel minister Beni Prasad Verma has cautioned environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan against holding up clearances for SAIL’s iron ore mines in Orissa and Jharkhand, saying this would force the state-owned steel giant to scale down operations and could stoke Naxal activity in the tribal region. Verma’s November 30 missive to Natarajan comes close on the heels of SAIL’s top brass sounding the alarm on the delays in environmental clearance...