The American Power Act would at last set limits on US greenhouse gas emissions

The bulk of our motives for buying green are selfish, say psychologists. So would appealing to social positioning help shift behaviours better than moralising?

The United Progressive Alliance government has drafted a showpiece bill to guarantee food for each and every poor person in India. But the government is yet to define who is poor. After objections from within and outside the government, the Empowered Group of Ministers (egom) that drafted the National Food Security bill said it will consider changes.

India, like the rest of the world, is experiencing an epidemic of diabetes, a chronic disease characterized by dangerous levels of sugar in the blood that cause cardiovascular and kidney disease, which lower life expectancy. The prevalence of diabetes (the proportion of the population with diabetes) has been increasing steadily in India over recent decades, particularly in urban areas.

The barriers created by stunted agricultural growth for industrial development have constituted a recurrent theme in debates on Indian economic policy. This essay brings out these debates in terms of the disproportionality caused by the disparate rates of industrial and agricultural growth.

They were the sort of headlines that could deflate even the most ardent healthy-eating campaigner.