-The Times of India NEW DELHI: This party season, you could save yourself some trouble by keeping the music down. For, the cops intend to be party poopers at raucous gatherings. The force is procuring noise meters to book people found violating the permissible sound limit. If Delhi Police sources are to be believed, cops would not stop at that in their drive for a less noisy city. The hand-held meters would...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court, which on Tuesday ordered compulsory registration of First Information Reports, noted that the burking (suppression) of crime might itself be in the range of 60 lakh cases every year. Quoting figures from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a five-judge Constitution Bench, said: "Registration of FIRs leads to less manipulation in criminal cases and lessens incidents of ‘antedated' FIR or deliberately delayed FIR." The NCRB figures showed that...

-The Hindu Opinion polls should be regulated, not banned. Ideally, it should be self-regulation by pollsters and media organisations. The debate around the latest proposal to ban opinion polls is an opportunity in disguise. Beneath the familiar acrimony of partisan debates, a much-needed middle ground has emerged quietly. All we need is a group of stakeholders - pollsters, researchers, media heads and political leaders - to come together to turn this possibility...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Admitting that charitable hospitals flout norms despite monitoring, the Maharashtra government will now set up and maintain an online real-time database in all such hospitals to make sure the indigent and economically backward citizens can avail of affordable medical services. Having issued a Government Resolution to this effect on October 22, the government will spend on setting up computer hardware and employ one 'Aarogya Mitra', under the Rajiv...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Some 55,000 women and girls trafficked from Bengal are working as maids in Delhi, many of them "sold as bonded labourers" to wealthy households where they slog for ungodly hours without pay and are often tortured or sexually abused. More than half these women are minors - many as young as 10 - who are duped with promises of a better life and brought to the capital by...