-The Telegraph Paris: An international forestry research agency has accused the world's biggest users of coal, including India, of continuing their emphasis on coal-fired energy and thus threatening global efforts to curb Earth-warming greenhouse emissions. The Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has bracketed India with Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Colombia and America as countries whose continued focus on coal is putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It has said these countries' pursuit...

-Livemint.com In 1986, Italian journalist Carlo Petrini was outraged when McDonald’s opened its first outlet in Rome. He saw this as a threat to Italy’s culinary culture. He led a protest against the global industrialization of food, which culminated in the slow food movement. Starting in Rome, the movement is now a worldwide phenomenon. Edited excerpts from an interview at the Indigenous Terra Madre in Shillong: * What are the key achievements...

-The Telegraph Paris: Rich nations led by the US have ensured that a key UN-mediated loss-and-damage mechanism to counter the effects of global warming would lose its teeth in the climate-change agreement expected to emerge here next week. The draft agreement, released today, has the words "compensation" and "liability" deleted from the text, nixing the possibility of holding the developed nations accountable for climate change-triggered disasters and forcing them to pay damages. The...

-The Hindu India says it is ready for a regime of stocktaking of future carbon emissions. In a clear signal that active diplomacy is at work to forge an agreement in Paris based on voluntary pledges, one that is subject to transparent monitoring, India said on Friday that it was ready for a regime of stocktaking of future carbon emissions. The U.S., on its part, said it had “nothing but respect” for...

-The Hindu India’s strategy at the Paris Climate Change summit will be to work with emerging economies and press the developed world to concede that responsibility for cutting carbon emissions after 2020 cannot be shared equally by rich and poor nations. Two major issues that New Delhi will focus on at the Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are failed ambitions on transferring low...