-IANS Nearly 56 percent of families in Bihar have a mobile or landline connection, but about 77 percent of the population lack toilets, says a census report, highlighting the paradoxes in the state which has taken big leaps in development but also lagged behind in key areas. "Till 2001, only 2.2 percent families were using any kind of telecom facility in Bihar, now over half of its population owns a phone, as...

Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress appears set to open another front against the Centre - this time over the June 30 deadline for changing the delivery of cable TV to digital. West Bengal government's urban development minister Firhad Hakim claimed here on Tuesday that the deadline was fixed "without consulting states".  He said the June 30 deadline would "create problems for cable operators" in the state and would mean that people would...

One tweet that had many cracking up was: “Dear Mamata, normally the cartoonist tries to capture the subject. Not vice versa.” The allegation was that Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra has used email id of his neighbour Subrata Sengupta (70) to forward an e-mail containing a graphic with a humorous reference to Mamata Banerjee for replacing Dinesh Trivedi with Mukul Roy as Railway Minister. The graphic uses photographs of the three Trinamool...

-The Indian Express   By the ferocity of her reaction to a weak cartoon, Mamata Banerjee proves her detractors right Mamata Banerjee has made political satire redundant. Her exaggerated, distorted reaction to a cartoon about herself makes her look like a tinpot tyrant. Was the cartoon defamatory? Only to the extent that any political cartoon is — it referenced Satyajit Ray’s detective classic Sonar Kella, and showed Mamata Banerjee and Mukul Roy making...

Chief Justice of India (CJI) S H Kapadia on Thursday said a very good law like Right to Information (RTI) was being misused to ask irrelevant and intrusive questions seriously impeding the working of the Judges and the Supreme Court.  When a bench of CJI and Justices D K Jain, S S Nijjar, R P Desai and J S Khehar were deliberating on reporting guidelines of sub-judice matters, Justice Kapadia said,...