-Outlook The death of 39 rhinos in and around the world-famous Kaziranga National Park in less than 10 months has brought to the fore the threat faced by the endangered animal. The threat comes from poachers, who kill the rare one-horned rhinoceros for its prized horn whose price in the international market varies from Rs 40 lakh to Rs 90 lakh, and flood which is an annual occurrence in Assam. Early last month,...

-Reuters Supreme Court has suspended iron ore transportation in western Goa and asked for a report into illegal mining in the state in four weeks, Justice Aftab Alam said on Friday. Goa state had already suspended mining activities there in September. The top court has asked the Central Empowered Committee to submit a report on illegal mining in Goa in four weeks, the judge added. Goa is the country's second-biggest iron ore producing...

-Outlook As part of the ongoing probe into the multi-crore illegal granite quarrying scam in Madurai, police today raided the film production company of Union Minister M K Alagiri's son, Durai Dayanidhi, an accused in the case. The police team from Madurai searched the premises of Dayanidhi's cinema company here for nearly an hour, sources said without elaborating. Dayanidhi, for whom a special police team was on the lookout, and nine others are...

-The Telegraph The Manmohan Singh government has decided to aggressively highlight the Supreme Court’s opinion on allocation of natural resources to debunk the CAG’s coal report that presumed losses of Rs 1.86 lakh crore. Although the government had given a restrained formal response yesterday, senior ministers P. Chidambaram, Salman Khurshid and Kapil Sibal were fielded again today. The ministers carefully avoided attacking the CAG directly but the essence of their argument was that...

-The Hindu The work of India’s supreme auditor cannot be put through an audit unless the institution itself initiates one The relentless campaign against the Comptroller and Auditor-General, of an unprecedented ferocity, compels me to write again on the subject. First, has the CAG caused a political and constitutional crisis, as some have argued? All that the CAG does is to submit audit reports. Any audit report, if it is a good report,...