Reports

In all 102 MLAs i.e. 35 per cent (out of 293 analysed) in the new West Bengal Assembly have pending criminal cases as per their own declarations. Seventy-five MLAs out of these 102 analysed have declared serious IPC charges like murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and theft against them. All major parties have MLAs with pending criminal cases. The Trinamool Congress has 69 MLAs out of 183 analysed (38 per cent), the Congress has 17 out of 42 (41 per cent) and CPI(M) has seven out of 40 (18 per...

Now before we rush out to buy that Mother’s Day card or put up a nice-sounding status message on Facebook, here’s something that ought to have a sobering effect on us. India, reveals the State of the World’s Mothers 2011 released Saturday, ranks 75th among 79 less developed countries in terms of the importance that the country gives to its women and mothers. The Index also tells us a lot, by default, about what the Congress-led government in New Delhi has been doing for women and mothers – India...

Four out of five female sex workers in India have joined the profession voluntarily; they were not forced or sold into it. Prostitution is just one among several livelihood options available to women from poor backgrounds, says a new survey. The ‘First pan-India survey of sex workers’, conducted by Pune University researchers Rohini Sahni and V Kalyan Shankar, found that 79.4 per cent of sex workers (both those who entered the profession directly as well as those with prior experience in other...

Sometime last week, the Calcutta High Court passed a judgment that went unnoticed in the news space. The court held that using the word “Darjeeling” was not the sole prerogative of the Tea Board. It ruled that the ITC Sonar hotel in Kolkata was free to carry on with its Darjeeling Lounge. The ruling is certainly all about corporates and intellectual property laws and rights. The judgment, which was first reported by the prolific Spicy IP blog, draws the line till which one can push the...

Archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue of powerful pharaoh Amenhotep III at his 3,400-year-old mortuary temple in southern Egyptian city of Luxor. It is one of the largest of its kind to be discovered by the country's antiquities authority. The 13 metre tall statue of Amenhotep III, consisting of seven large quartzite blocks, was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation...

Swan. Zebra. Tiger. Parrot. Giraffe. Cheetah. No, one is not alluding to wildlife conservation of any kind. Nor, for that matter, is this article about a visit to the nearest zoo or a lesson in fauna. It is instead about the infamous second-generation (2G) telecommunications spectrum scam. Only, that these were prefixes used by promoters of companies to conjure up new players and participants in a frantic bid to bag lucrative telecom licences. That's the really 'wild' aspect of the issuance of...

The ten most at-risk forested hotspots around the world have have lost 90 per cent or more of their original habitat. Each harbours at least 1500 endemic plant species - species found nowhere else in the world. If these forests are lost, says Conservation International, those endemic species are also lost forever. To mark launch of the International Year of Forests on Wednesday, Conservation International has highlighted the ten most at-risk forested hotspots around the world. These forests...

The International Year of Forests 2011 is being officially launched today with the Nagoya ABS Protocol opening for signature by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Today is also World Wetlands Day, and the 40th anniversary of the Convention on Wetlands. This year the theme is “Forests for Water and Wetlands”. The 'Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological...

One year after the death of the last member of the Bo tribe of the Andaman Islands, Survival International has warned that the neighbouring Jarawa tribe is also in danger. Boa Sr, the last of the Bo, died last January aged around 85. The Jarawa tribe number 365 people, and fiercely resisted contact with outsiders until 1998. Now an illegal road cuts through the Jarawa’s rainforest, and poachers and tourists invade their land. Poachers steal the animals the Jarawa need to survive and, like the...

A tiny bird that weighs less than 100 grams has completed a 27,000 km round trip migration for the second time. This is the first time a wader has been tracked with a geolocator on its complete migration in successive years. The bird in question was a ruddy turnstone ( Arenaria interpres), a small wader weighing less than 100 grams which spends the (austral) summer months on many of the beaches around Australia. They are one of the family of waders that migrate huge distances to Siberia in...