Kashmir, which India considers as the core of its unity in diversity, is turning out to be the Great Divider of the activists. Medha Patkar, one of the flag-bearers of the activist armada in the country, today termed Kashmir an integral part of India, leaving a section of her supporters embarrassed and fuming. Patkar, who is also associated with Team Anna whose key member Prashant Bhushan was last week roughed up for...

What began as a few whispers is now a booming drumbeat. Powerful senior ministers are asserting that the Right to Information Act (RTI), till now flaunted as one of the UPA government’s biggest gifts to the aam aadmi, is “transgressing into government functioning”. Similar misgivings are being voiced on another constitutional body that has been in the news lately—the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). Put together, this has...

It would have meant endless sorties and waste of fuel for choppers but for the combined technology of GIS and GPS used by the forest department to map wildlife areas that gave the pilots the much-needed coordinates to carry out relief operations in the almost inaccessible Dzongu. Crafted by the forest department to prepare maps meant for delineation, protection and management of wildlife areas, the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global...

-The Hindu   It speaks to the deeply divisive times we live in that Team Anna activist and Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan was savagely assaulted in his own chamber — and in the full glare of television cameras — for the “crime” of saying something that his attackers disapproved of. In the past, intolerant groups who seem to have no problem breaking the law with impunity, have targeted writers, artists, journalists,...

-The Telegraph   Four farmers were killed and 10 injured when security forces opened fire on agitating jute cultivators at Bechimari weekly market along National Highway 52 in Darrang this afternoon. Just 15km from where the skirmish broke out today, 15 people were gunned down during a historic clash between the British administration and villagers of Patharughat over a rise in land revenue in 1894. Almost 117 years later, the rulers' side has changed,...