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New York: With preparation for next week’s independence referendum in Southern Sudan in their final stages, the United Nations is seeking to ensure that every last voter in the more than four-million-strong electorate will have a ballot, no matter how remote and inaccessible the location.

New York: Passenger and freight air traffic grew substantially in 2010 as positive economic prospects worldwide overshadowed the depressed levels of 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, according to preliminary United Nations figures.

If Additional Sessions Judge BP Verma wanted to expose the Indian judiciary to international ridicule, he couldn’t have done so more effectively than by sentencing the celebrated health and civil liberties activist, Dr Binayak Sen, to life imprisonment on the trivial charge of passing on to others letters written by an imprisoned suspected Maoist. Even this charge wasn’t established beyond reasonable doubt.

No one would have believed a year ago that Manmohan Singh would be outpaced by Nitish Kumar in the credibility and performance stakes. While the former was on the way to become the longest serving prime minister outside the Congress’s first family, the Bihar chief minister was yet to prove that he was any different from others in the same position elsewhere. Yet, how the scene has changed in 12 months!

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - The Government of Luxembourg has committed a further €1.5 million ($1.97 million) to an Asian Development Bank (ADB)-administered fund set up to strengthen financial systems in developing countries in Asia and the Pacific to aid inclusive growth.

After its invention and evolution, Braille has replaced a host of strategies/methodologies/ways and means, employed, in the retrospect, to provide literacy skills and some form of education to the blind persons around the world. Strategies developed before the advent of Braille, could hardly qualify to be termed as

Bhola Nath, after graduating from the National Institute of Visually Handicapped (NIVH) at Dehradun, started working as Inspector of Braille Appliances, at the Institute’s workshop, manufacturing Braille appliances. To anyone, this visually impaired young man seems to be very proud of his work and his Institute. After all, this Institute has been his home for years now. To a group of visiting official media people he gave a demonstration of use of ‘Braille Slate’ by writing with a Stylus and educated them about the various nuances of the assistive devices being produced here.

Jammu and Kashmir is witnessing diametrically opposite trends. On the one hand, the state’s security environment has vastly improved. On the other, conflicting developments are not only creating confusion in state’s politics but are also posing a threat to the stability of the Omar Abdullah-led coalition government.

KOLKATA: This could happen only in West Bengal.

The schedule for the next assembly elections due in May/June this year has not been announced. Neither the Left, nor the non-Left camp led by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) are ready.

KOLKATA: Between them, power aspirant Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the ruling CPI(M) in West Bengal have already plumbed the nadir in their political exchanges.