-The Hindustan Times Democracy is in peril in West Bengal, Partha Sarothi Ray alleged within hours of walking free from jail on Wednesday, after a number of intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his release. Ray was arrested on April 8 for participating in a sit-in demonstration protesting the eviction of about 200 families from Nonadanga by the Mamata Banerjee administration. He was granted bail on Wednesday, after...

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...

Aamra ekhon-o boli ni kon kagoj porte hobe, kintu agami dine kintu setao bole debo. (Till now, we haven’t told which newspapers must be read, but in the future, we will do that as well.) – West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, speaking on March 29 in defense of her government’s decision to bar all but 13 newspapers from more than 2,400 government-approved libraries across the state. “Kunal Ghosh, associate editor...

-The Economic Times The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Constitutional validity does not mean sense - after all, being stupid is not illegal. Public opinion is most exercised about all schools, even those that get no aid from government, being asked to provide 25% of their seats free to poor students.  The court has pronounced this a blow for affirmative action. Private schools...

The Justice MB Shah Committee, appointed by the Central Government to probe illegal mining of iron ore and manganese across the country met with a poor response in Ranchi, on the first day of the two-day public hearing. Jharkhand, accounts for a fourth of the country's iron ore. The few journalists covering the event outnumbered the public, and the former judge had to beseech the few attendees to come forward to...