It is a cruel summer, and India is staggering under a heat wave. North, East, South, West: all parts of India have stories of thirst and drought. Be it Bihar or Jharkhand, Bengal or Orissa, everywhere you find news about heat wave and scarcity of water. Much of India is reeling under a scorching heat […]
Bihar this week took the unprecedented step of forbidding any cooking over open fires between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., after fires swept through shantytowns and thatched-roof houses in villages and killed dozens. People were instead told to cook to night. While India remains in the midst of a heatwave that has killed more than […]
SYDNEY, Australia: They hid it inside gel bras, but got busted! Based on a tip-off by the Chinese Narcotic Control Commission, the Australian customs and the country’s Federal Police have busted a huge drug racket, making it one of their biggest hauls ever. Australian customs and police seized 720 litres of methylamphetamine, commonly known as […]
I begin on a self-indulgent note. “How is Amartya?” asked my uncle Shidhu (Jyotirmoy Sengupta) — cousin of my father — in a letter written from Burdwan Jail, on August 22 of 1934, before I was one. He complained about the name “Amartya”, given to me by Rabindranath Tagore, and argued that the great Tagore […]
95 per cent of the world’s people now live in areas covered by mobile signals. The number of mobile subscriptions worldwide rose to an estimated 7.1 billion in 2015 — it has more than trebled from 2.2 billion in 2005. So says the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, which launched the 2015 […]
PATNA: Some 21 years ago, Jharkhand based activist film maker Sri Prakash was doing the rounds with a video ‘Buddha weeps in Jadugoda’. It detailed the havoc being created by uranium mines in Jharkhand state. Now a Washington-based news organisation has released a report that claims radioactive and toxic waste have been leaking out of […]
Shillong: Private coal miners in Meghalaya were a bit jittery, because of rumours that the Modi government might just decide to shut down their operations. Meghalaya is the only state in India with privately owned mines, operated by the locals. Not long ago, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) recommended the banning of coal mining in […]
[DHAKA] A new US-supported study carried out in Bangladesh has linked low or moderate exposure to arsenic in drinking water is a risk factor for pneumonia in under-five children. This study is significant for India as well, because it shares the groundwater arsenic contamination problem. Findings of the study, jointly conducted by the International Centre […]
BHOPAL (Madhya Pradesh): Here is another ‘freak mobile tragedy’. A 7-year-old boy lost all the fingers of his right hand after a mobile phone exploded in his hands in Rajgarh district on Monday. The incident took place at Bilapura village under Pachor police station of the district at 8 am. Ajay, son of […]
NEW DELHI: The Madhesi agitation in Nepal may affect fruit juice drinkers in India. The Nepalese politicians living in the areas along the Indo-Nepal border have stopped the movement of vehicles along it in protest against certain provisions of the new Nepal Constitution. So goods can’t be moved from Nepal to India and vice-versa until […]
They came with bulldozers and broke down the school walls, even as children wept. That’s how an anti-encroachment drive on the banks of Harmu rivulet, that passes through Ranchi town went, on the day before Teacher’s day. For the 100 odd kids studying at this government school, it’s feels like an end to their school […]
JALPAIGURI (North Bengal): Is China encouraging the smuggling of cobra venom? Forest officials in the North Bengal region believe so. In ‘sting ‘operation, the forest department has seized of nine lbs of cobra venom worth over Rs 100 crore in international black market. It’s the second seizure over three months. So far, the department has […]
