Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...

The famine in the Horn of Africa is being seen as an inevitable consequence of drought, "the worst for 60 years". But this famine was almost entirely preventable, and presenting it as a natural disaster doesn't help; nor does our insistence on waiting for a major crisis before responding. Even though lessons about how to prevent famines have been documented time and time again, we don't learn. The conflict in Somalia...

-The Telegraph   The “abduction” of children from a school to feed the supply chain of a rally has shed light on how an “enlightened” Bengal has learnt to live comfortably with the abuse of the moral and legal rights of its children. A day after 45 children were plucked out of their school and made to march through the heart of the city, police split legal hairs, some parties found leaving children...

With nearly 800 million people unable to read or write, the United Nations today marked International Literacy Day with a warning that illiteracy undermines efforts to eliminate a host of social ills such as poverty and sickness and threatens the very stability of nations. “The costs are enormous,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message. “Illiteracy exacerbates cycles of poverty, ill-health and deprivation. It weakens communities and undermines democratic processes through...

The flawed Bill on food security has not received the kind of publicity that the Lokpal Bill has, but that does not diminish its significance. “THIS government has divided everything and everyone. There are different cards for different sections of the poor. If my employer, taking pity on me, gives me an old television, I am not entitled to a yellow card [Below Poverty Line card]. My son who is...