An 82-km cycle track to connect residential areas of the Mumbai suburb, 52 km in the kitty Pravin Pandurang Mandavkar, 24, serves vada-pav in the Thane Municipal Corporation canteen. Everyday, he commutes from his house in Kharegaon, seven kilometres away, on his bicycle. The daily commute, he said, is cumbersome and unsafe given the heavy traffic on the seven-kilometre stretch

Government promises stopping work on dam in Uttarkashi ENVIRONMENTALIST G D Agarwal has managed to stall the controversial Loharinag Pala power project coming up speedily on the Bhagirathi, a tributary of the Ganga. On February 20, the Ministry of Power assured him work on the dam would be suspended immediately. Following this, Agarwal who was into the 37th day of his hunger strike, broke

M Suchitra and photographer Ajeeb Komachi trekked deep into Kerala

Children pay for illegal mining operations in West Bengal THERE are about 20 mines, mostly illegal, in Salanpur village in Burdwan district. The district has rich deposits of coal, fire clay and iron ore. One among the 20, a fire clay mine, claimed two young lives on February 8 in the West Bengal village. Four and five year old Suman Karmakar and Prasinjit Dutt fell into a mine close to

>> A new Code of Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking has been developed in the US to help filmmakers assess and reduce the carbon footprints of productions. It was created by the non-profit Filmmakers for Conservation and the American University

On mitigation commitments of developed countries The proposal is silent on historical emissions or current per capita emissions. The formula focuses on capacity, ignoring

But where are the flowers? HIGH temperatures have caused spring flowers to bloom earlier than usual in Uttarakhand disrupting the annual festivities. This has dismayed children in the Garhwal district the most because each year when they wake up before dawn to collect wild flowers like Rhododendron arboreum (burans), Prunus cerasoides (painya) and Rainwerdtia indica (fyunli), they

Higher temperatures will kill forests. So much for sinks Trees

Europe

Marijuana to cancer: Scientists in Seattle have found that young men smoking marijuana were at a higher risk of developing an aggressive form of testicular cancer called nonseminoma than those who had never tried the drug. The disease is known to strike men in there 20s and 30s and is the most common type of cancer among men in the UK, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal

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