-The United Nations More than three million deaths in 2012 were linked to alcohol with a steady increase in alcohol use among women, the United Nations Health agency today reported calling on Governments to do more to prevent alcohol-related deaths and diseases. The "Global status report on alcohol and Health 2014" found that alcohol consumption increases people's risk of developing more than 200 diseases including liver cirrhosis and some cancers, as well...

-Odisha Sun Times Bureau   Keonjhar (Odisha): In a shocking, shameful and barbaric incident, a lady worker and a cook of an anganwadi centre in Odisha's Keonjhar district allegedly threw piping hot liquid residue (peja) of cooked rice on a child, leaving him critically injured. The child was reportedly punished for ‘defiling' the boiled eggs kept for the children in the Anganwadi Kendra. The child's father Rilu Munda has alleged that his child suffered...

-The Hindu   No one can attack India's well-founded Intellectual Property regime as being weak merely because a drug that is claimed to be an invention fails the test of law India and its intellectual property (IP) laws have been the subject of sharp criticism recently. Now, there is talk of the government invoking emergency provisions with regard to Dasatinib, a cancer drug. The decibel level may go up several notches. Let us look...

-The Hindu   If Gujarat is a model, then the real toppers in development indicators, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, must be supermodels In an earlier article published on this page ("The Gujarat Muddle," April 11, 2014), I pointed out that Gujarat's development achievements were hardly "model" class. This is pretty firm ground: the same point has been made by a long list of eminent economists. Yet confusion persists, so I decided to...

-The Times of India   Prem Das Rai, an MP from Sikkim, knew that development indicators from his state were exceptional. But his office didn't know how to showcase them. He reached out to Swaniti, a Delhi-based not-for-profit organization that has been working "consulting style" with parliamentarians. Their portal called Jigyasa aims to answer questions like Rai's. Rwitwika Bhattacharya, Swaniti's founder-CEO, was surprised at what they uncovered. "I always thought that the...