-Frontline Corruption tends to be greater in periods when there is a state-engineered redistribution of wealth in favour of a few at the explicit or implicit expense of the many. Liberalisation is one such period. IT cannot be verified and may not be true. But, the view that the record of graft and corruption during the two-term, nine-year rule of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is the worst in India's post-Independence...

-The Telegraph Meet the Merciful Marxists, never mind the Bolsheviks preferred a bullet to the head and Meera Bhattacharjee graced a public platform in Calcutta to seek the death penalty. Prakash Karat today said the CPM had decided to advocate without exception the abolition of death penalty, almost a decade after its Bengal unit led a vociferous campaign to hang teen rapist and killer Dhananjoy Chatterjee. "The central committee has decided that...

-The Hindu A committee comprising farmers' representatives will look at the method of fixing the minimum support price of agricultural commodities. It will suggest if there is a need for the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) to re-position itself in the LIGht of the demands from farmers to raise the remunerative price for essential commodities. At its first meeting held here on Thursday, the panel headed by Director of National Centre...

-The Hindu Kolkata: In a setback to the Mamata Banerjee government, the Calcutta High Court on Friday directed that panchayat polls in 17 districts be held in three phases with the government fully compensating the shortfall in security forces to the satisfaction of the State Election Commission. Justice Biswanath Somadder rejected the government's arguments on all the contentious issues in its writ petition and directed that it inform the Commission of...

-The Times of India While disapproving law minister Ashwani Kumar's interference with the coal scam investigations, the Supreme Court invoked a 1997 judgment to drive home the message that even the Prime Minister, who has administrative jurisdiction over the CBI, did not have the power to do so. This was one of the highLIGhts of the written order released on Thursday of the three-hour hearing the previous day in which the government...