-AFP Later this month, India will be removed from a dwindling list of countries where polio is considered endemic, a huge achievement made possible by people like Madara, a 76-year-old street hawker.  At a temporary immunisation camp in a slum in the northern district of Ghaziabad, 23 kilometres (14 miles) from New Delhi, he is busy at work shepherding boisterous children into queues.  All around, social workers break open tiny bottles containing a...

Mohammad Aamir had just turned 18, when one February day in 1998, he was ambushed by a police van. A month later, he found himself thrown against the cold, forbidding walls of a prison cell in the capital's Tihar jail. The charges were murder, terrorism and waging war against the nation. Aamir, released in January this year after 14 years, was named the main accused in 20 low-intensity bomb blasts executed...

In the summer of 2009, farmer Ramesh Dhumale was excited when he got to plant about a kilo of seeds of what was pitched as the country’s first indigenously developed genetically modified (GM) cotton. At Rs 200 a kg, the seeds were far cheaper than the Rs 1,500-2,000 that the other GM cotton seeds cost. But the biggest plus was that the farmers could use and reuse the seeds from successive...

The uneasy head that wears the Prime Minister’s Crown has been given a clean chit but not the bureaucrats. The Supreme Court today acknowledged that a Prime Minister could not be expected to look into “minute details” of every case placed before him but launched a blistering attack on officials of the PMO and the law ministry for failing to apprise Manmohan Singh of the gravity of the charges against A....

-The Hindu   Talks between Central experts' team and State panel adjourned The much-awaited talks between the Central experts team on Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project and the State panel, scheduled for Tuesday, did not take place after a couple of anti-nuke protestors were roughed up by Hindu Munnani activists on the Collectorate premises here even as they arrived at the venue for talks. The Palayamkottai police have arrested fourteen persons, including Hindu Munnani State...