Prime Minister Manmohan Singh\'s statement to the National Development Council that \"we need to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably in the fruits of development, these must have first claim on resources\" was backed up by the statement in Parliament by the minister of minorities affairs that Government will implement the recommendations of Sachar Committee, have on one hand acted as the ray of hope for the\"discriminated against\" Muslim minorities, while on the other hand RSS combine has started crying fowl, BJP asserting that it is rank communalism, its ideologues saying that these steps of the govt are in the footsteps of Jinnah. BJP has raised the serious question mark on the very formation of this committee calling it unnecessary and it being against the interest of the nation.

Peoples\' Forum against ADB The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is the third largest source of development finance in the Asia-Pacific region, next to the World Bank Group and the Japanese Government. Every year, ADB moves huge amounts of money across the Asia-Pacific region in a bid to foster rapid economic growth and market capitalism.

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved.

If the Sardar Sarovar Dam’s height is increased, a clandestine move violating Supreme Court guidelines, 35,000 homeless families in the submergence zone will be exiled from their habitat, writes Medha Patkar in a letter to Water Resources Minister Saif-ud-din Soz

A popular rural radio station in Bihar has turned silent after the authorities closed it down because its owner, a poor and illiterate man, did not possess an operating licence. The Radio Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1 channel, beaming from Mansoorpur village in Vaishali district for the past three years, was closed down Sunday for running illegally - to the disappointment of hundreds of people who loved to tune into it.

The BJP Government is ensuring to make a mockery of the \"rule of law\", by resorting to age-old tactics to block the Bail of those \"accused\" in serious offences like \"attempt to murder\". This should become a \"test case\" for human rights organisations as to how the Police officials and the SDM have flouted every single provision of the law dealing with the \"rights of the accused\" and their \"personal liberty, dignity and human rights. If this could be done by the Police and the SDM in the case of workers and activists of mass-based organisations like Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, a national forum like INDIAN SOCIAL ACION FORUM (INSAF), and Gram Panchayat leaders, then one could imagine as to what is the fate of the ordinary citizens in this State/country.