HARYANA HAS emerged as the hub of premium quality basmati rice in the country, accounting for as much as 40 percent of exports. Sushil Jain, president of Rice Export Association, Haryana, says, “Exports from Haryana have nearly doubled in the past two years. The value of the rice produced last year was close to 8,000 crore.” Among the districts, Karnal alone accounts for 50 percent of Haryana’s exports, which is […]

It seems that barely a day goes by in China without news of yet another food safety scandal. But the latest case – even by Chinese standards – was truly stomach-churning. Hundreds of people were arrested after passing off rat meat as lamb. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the scandal has given rise to a round of stories about rodents. I heard one anecdote about a restaurant in southern China that serves up […]

ZARI, Afghanistan — Because of the poppies, the raw material for most of the world’s heroin, the list of things 1st Lt. Christopher Gackstatter and his 2nd Platoon can’t do in Sartok is far longer than the list of things they can. Marching into the mud-walled village in t­­his sun-baked district of southern Afghanistan on an April 24 intelligence-gathering mission, the boyish 25-year-old lieutenant and his roughly dozen riflemen and […]

China says 904 people have been arrested for selling fake, spoiled, or adulterated meat over three months. State media portrayed the arrests on Thursday as part of a national crackdown that would now focus on dairy products, but an official told the state’s Xinhua News Agency that there were deep-seated food safety problems which had not yet been solved. Xinhua News Agency said suspects sold meat that had been injected with water to increase […]

In Pic :Electronics giant Sharp has been losing money fast Japan’s electronic giants once ruled the world. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp were household names. Now those same companies are in deep trouble, losing billions of dollars a year. How have the mighty Japanese companies fallen so low? The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo looks at what went wrong. If you want to get an idea of what’s gone wrong with Japan’s […]

AMRITSAR, India, Feb 21 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron says a giant diamond his country forced India to hand over in the colonial era that was set in a royal crown will not be returned. Speaking on the third and final day of a visit to India aimed at drumming up trade and investment, Cameron ruled out handing back the 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond, now on display in the […]

As public evidence mounts that the Chinese military is responsible for stealing massive amounts of U.S. government data and corporate trade secrets, the Obama administration is poised to spell out specific trade actions it may take against Beijing or any other country guilty of cyber-espionage. According to officials familiar with the plans, the White House is eyeing fines, penalties and other trade restrictions as initial, more-aggressive steps the U.S. would take in […]

The theory that public smoking bans cut the number of children born prematurely has been strengthened by new research. The study of 600,000 births found three successive drops in babies born before 37 weeks – each occurring after a phase of a public smoking ban was introduced. There was no such trend in the period before the bans were put in place, the British Medical Journal reported. The study, by […]