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Cover Story

Lethal Games

CSE LAB STUDY: TOXIC TOYS

Editor's page

2010: choose your future today

A new decade. For me¤ three decades of work in environment. I wonder: have matters improved since the early 1980s¤ when I began? Or¤ are things worse off? Where do we go from here?

News

A measure of pollution

Biofuel dreams for wastelands

Centre now has a policy¤ but where’s the wasteland?

News 360°

News 360° - Briefs

A bridge divides them

Highway authority runs into 30,000 people facing displacement

Doctors get reminder on ethics

Stop taking gifts from pharma companies: Medical Council

Patkar attacked

Public hearing on operation Greenhunt called off

South Asia

Tribals take on polluters

Sponge iron unit poisons their drinking water¤ farms

No developed land for farmers

Maharashtra takes U turn; amends rehabilitation law

According to report

Kolkata air cleaner

Two-stroke autorickshaw ban shows results

Landmark ATM

Mumbai’s solar powered teller machine saves Rs 20,000 a year

‘Private helipads, a must for Mumbai’

They will improve response to terror attacks: Maharashtra government

POSCO bags 1,174 ha forests

Villagers resist land acquisition for steel plant

Workers fall ill

Hunger claims five lives

Government aid too late for family in Orissa’s tribal district

Put on notice

RTI rap for two officers

Rs 10,000 salary cut for delay in giving information

In Court

News 360°

News 360° - Briefs

Science & Technology

Sedimental attraction

A drowning delta can be rescued by changing the nature of its sediments, new theory claims

Birds are losing their voice

A perplexing water cycle

Agricultural areas get no rain, urban areas face water logging

Microbes are always smarter

A fig for the pain

Bark of the banyan tree cures joint pain and inflammation

The dominant survives

Increasing nitrogen levels will pit plants against each other

See end to end

A new lens for radars to bring in more efficient communication

Coating is better than cure

A new way to filter polluting nano-particles out of the water

Science & Technology - Briefs

Obituary

The voice of fishers

He championed fishers’ rights and conservation

Feature

Left to quacks

Unauthorized medical practitioners find business where Bihar’s health machinery deserts polio victims

Foodwise

Farmers in Maharashtra revive 120 varieties of local crops

Their own suppliers

Scarcity teaches a village in Orissa how to manage its water supply

24x7 water in the 1700s

300-year-old aqueduct to get protected heritage statu

Bitters for starters

A typical Bengali meal is eaten course by course. Kaushik Das Gupta shows how the tradition helps refine taste buds

Leader

A programme for the polio victim?

It is not easy to trust a doctor who comes calling, studies the patient’s sickness, and leaves without a prescription even. More so when the patient is a child in a poor family and has polio.

Yet this is routine in parts of the country where polio is endemic. Each child with symptoms like fever, muscle aches and abdominal pain is visited by teams from the World Health Organisation, for stool samples. This is to check for the presence of the polio virus and identify the strain circulating in the area. That done, the child becomes a statistic.

Crosscurrent

Fringe benefits taxed

Post-independence policies have taken away all securities of the small farmer

Fear of asteroids is expensive

Unmanned space missions can be as helpful in garnering knowledge of outer space

Review

Malthus revisited

In 2005, Paul Roberts wrote The End of Oil, which forecast the end of an economy based on cheap oil.

An unsung genius

Paul Dirac could speak five languages, but he was famous for his silences.

Bogus science

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, once wrote, “Free culture knows no bounds.”

From the blurbs

The Aid Trap by Glen Hubbard and William Duggan, Columbia University Press, US$ 16

Two leading business studies scholars make the case that foreign aid and Third World projects aren’t working. Glen Hubbard and William Duggan condemn the UN’s Millennium Goals strategy as a “charity trap”, that perverts local economies and “keeps corrupt leaders rich”.

Waves in the Hinterland, Journey of a Newspaper, Farah Naqvi, Zubaan, Rs 395

Media

Can’t walk and talk

India’s Advertising Standards Council has pulled up 15 companies for running ad campaigns that violated the council’s codes. The guilty included Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular and fast moving consumer goods player Dabur and Elder Pharma.

Hecklers

Tired of the mainstream media describing their neighbourhood as a hotbed of crime, a group of people from one of Buenos Aires’ largest slums have brought out a magazine aimed at breaking down the stereotype. The weekly Desde Adentro (From the Inside) focusses on youth, education, health and housing problems in Villa 1-11-14, home to 60,000 people.

Push comes to shovel

On the last day of 2009, a phrase died a quiet death. “Shovel ready” incessantly invoked by the Obama administration to sell its US$ 787 billion federal stimulus bill was included in a list titled ‘Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness’. The list is brought out every year in the US by the Lake Superior State University.

News Snippets

>> Aboriginal children in the Australian state of Queensland can now be published authors, courtesy a non-profit publishing firm Budburra Books. It has started a programme that will allow students of aboriginal communities to write, illustrate and publish their own books.

Ancient story new discovery

A Sydney-based astronomer has used ancient culture and modern technology to identify a meteorite crater in central Australia. Macquarie University PhD candidate Duane Hamacher has spent the past 18 months researching how aboriginal people incorporated the night sky into their culture. He says he used a story of the Arrente people and Google maps to find a crater, unknown to geologists.

Company time

Facebook, the popular social networking site, offers its users a test to estimate its popularity. It is called ‘How addicted are you to Facebook’. Arnab Chatterjee is 92 per cent addicted. Chaterjee works with a private radio station and his status updates on Facebook changes every five minutes.

Goodbye on mobile

Aziza Kobilova, a 25-year-old housewife in eastern Tajikistan’s Rasht region, recently received notice that her marriage of four years was over.

THOSE WHO DON’T KEEP QUIET

www.turbulence.org.uk

Letters

Service providers or profiteers?

Health insurance is a service and we, the consumers, pay for it. The article (‘Run from cover’, December 16-31, 2009) raised the subject, though it fell short of detecting the problem. It is important to discuss it because the service sector in India lacks in one major aspect—service.

CSE WEBNET

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