-The Indian Express   We don’t want any more Nandigrams,” said the Supreme Court, hearing the petition on the Allahabad high court’s cancellation of land acquisition projects in Greater Noida, because of the complaint that this land was acquired for industrial purposes and then transferred for residential use. The court also warned the UP government that it would have to intervene if the state relied on the urgency clause to take...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will chair the full-fledged meeting of the Planning Commission next month to approve the ‘Approach Paper' to the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) that is likely to focus on raising economic growth to 9-9.5 per cent. Officials in the Finance Ministry said the approach paper would provide the broad FRAmework of the government policy to be pursued in the five-year period to achieve the desired growth rate....

Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...

-The United Nations   The United Nations today declared that the world has completely eradicated a cattle disease that has killed millions of bovines for millennia. It is the first animal disease to be officially declared eradicated – and only the second disease ever, after smallpox. A resolution approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at its meeting in Rome today stated that the world was free of rinderpest, or...

In another case of alleged FRAud during implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in Meghalaya, a father-son duo duped gullible villagers in the name of implementation of the Central scheme. The matter came to light after villagers from Thadan village, 40 km from here, got wind of the scam and filed a Right To Information (RTI) application which showed their names enlisted as workers having job cards. Louis...