-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The Hindu If the Adani group is allowed to continue its development projects in Kutch simply by ‘compensating' for their ecological damage, the Centre will set a Dangerous precedent that lets money power trump environmental regulations The Adani Group may be fined Rs.200 crore for a series of environmental violations committed by their waterfront development, port and power plant projects in the Mundra taluka of Kutch district. The waterfront development project, which...

-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Hindu Former Justice K.S. Puttaswamy, who went to court against the linking of state benefits to the UID scheme, says much money has been wasted on the ‘Dangerous' project The Supreme Court order restraining the linking of services and benefits to the 12-digit Aadhaar number has placed in doubt ambitious plans by the Centre and several State governments to make the ‘voluntary' Aadhaar scheme mandatory for access to services and subsidies....

-The Hindu     IPCC report affirms reality of 2o Celsius rise over industrial-age levels The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded on Friday that it is now more certain than ever before that human-caused climate change is real, and greenhouse gas emissions are causing changes to the planet that could possibly trigger Dangerous consequences by the turn of the century. These conclusions came as part of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) on the...