Imagine you are a citizen racing across newspapers rapid fire. As you flip the pages you run across events like the Vedanta mining case, the Koodankulam nuclear controversy, the debate on poverty and reports about climate change. Each of these can be a life-threatening event and none of them have a life support system of knowledge which allows them to be debated in the open. The basic information comes from...

-PTI The government on Tuesday said it has agreed in-principle to deregulate diesel prices, but is not considering similar proposal for the cooking gas.  "Government has, in principle, agreed to make the prices of diesel market determined," Minister of State for Finance Namo Narain Meena said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.  While petrol prices are market-linked, the government fixes the rates of LPG, kerosene and diesel, which results in a...

Judicial gag orders are as abhorrent as executive restraints on the media   Some interim orders issued by the courts have restrained publication or comment on certain matters of public Importance. Orders imposing judicial censorship on the media have been extremely rare. Except in the rarest of rare cases, judicial “gag orders” are as abhorrent as executive restraints on the media. The changed situation calls for a comment on these judicial orders and...

BIJLIPUR (PUNJAB): For some time now, the village of Bijlipur has been attracting a slew of local news TV crews and even reporters from Canadian radio stations. The village has something that most of Punjab can't boast of: a sex ratio in favour of women. The state of Punjab along with Haryana is among the country's worst performers when it comes to sex ratio. The census 2011 figures record 893 females...

-The Telegraph   The New York Times has reported that Wal-Mart, the US-based retail giant, hushed up an internal investigation sometime after the company was told of a bribery campaign to obtain licences and facilitate rapid expansion in Mexico. Some of the alleged instances of bribery are certain to ring a bell in India where it is not too difficult to bend rules for a price. The New York Times said its “examination...