KOHIMA, July 16: Prominent organisations in Nagaland have urged both Centre and NSCN(IM) to extend the ongoing ceasefire, which expires on July 31, further while calling for steps to expedite the political talks to hammer out a solution to the problem, reports PTI. The Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC), in a statement, appealed to the Centre and NSCN(IM) to extend the present tenure of ceasefire and called for maintenance of terms and conditions of truce by both sides. regarding the announcement by NSCN(K) that it wanted to have a formal ceasefire with the Union government, NBCC urged to...

GUWAHATI, July 17: In the aftermath of the recent Nandankanan Zoo tragedy, white tigers are likely be removed from all zoos across the country, said R Bhattacharyya, State Zoo DFO here yesterday. The DFO said that though no decision has been taken in this regard yet quarters concerned are toying with the idea as white tigers do not have any scientific value at all. The white tiger is born due to the elbino-genetic deformity for which it's resistance is lower than that of normal tigers. As the lineage of all white tigers in any zoo of the country can be traced directly or indirectly to one such...

GUWAHATI, July 17: The Jamuna Multipurpose Bridge Project (JMBP) in Bangladesh will ultimately lead to devastating flood and severe erosion in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, warned noted geographer Manik Kar of Nowgong College. Jamuna is the name of the Bangladesh part of the Brahmaputra. A PhD in flood hazard, Kar said in his paper Flood Hazard Mitigation is an International Riddle : A Case Study of the Brahmaputra Valley (India), represented at an international conference on disaster management organised by CARE, UNDP and Dhaka University recently, that the around billion-dollar JMBP...

GUWAHATI, July 17: Way back in the 1990s, there were at least 10,000 hectare of land under coffee cultivation in the Northeast. Today it is just about 3,000 hectare. Production, which should ideally have been in the range of 4,000 tons a year, hovers around the 400 tons mark. But these are only rough estimates. Ask the Coffee Board's Guwahati office for data on coffee cultivation in the region and you are likely to be refused. The Coffee Board, incidentally, is the main agency entrusted with the work of prompting coffee cultivation in the region. The Board's reluctance to part with the data is...

GUWAHATI, July 17: In another major breakthrough a police team arrested a top ULFA militant suspected to be the linkman with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence at Vellore in Tamil Nadu. Sources said that the police team acting on specific information conducted a raid at Vellore and arrested the top ULFA militant Hasan Ali who happens to be the member of the ULFA's central committee. He was also the chief of the Chaur Development Committee of the outfit and was mainly doing liaison work among immigrant population to which ULFA has of late started using as their hideouts in the state. He is...