Suicide by pesticide: It's an epidemic in India, where farmers try to keep up with the latest pest-resistant seeds only to find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of pesticides that don't work, drought and debt. Since 1997, more than 25,000 farmers have committed suicide, many drinking the chemical that was supposed to make their crops more, not less, productive.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Sweden wants to curb the influence of religion in private confessional schools in a move to prevent the spread of fundamentalism, government officials said Monday. The new rules being drafted by the center-right government would ban religious elements in subjects other than religion, such as biology, Education Minister Jan Bjorklund told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Iskcon has turned its personal experience of the reality of terrorism into a reel weapon in the fight against terror across the world. A year after an act of violence sullied its precincts midway through a Janmashtami function, the management of the Iskcon temple in Imphal, Manipur has produced a documentary that it hopes will hold a mirror to practitioners of terror.

So-called hurricane modifiers aim to steer dangerous weather patterns off course and to weaken hurricanes in the hope of preventing disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Scientists have devised a plan to reduce hurricane wind speeds by having a plane drop soot into near-freezing clouds at the top of a hurricane, causing it to warm.