-The Hindu   Top civil society bodies are challenging the government's ‘counter-affidavit' in the Paid News case which seeks to gut the Election Commission's powers In a major twist to the Ashok Chavan vs. Madhav Kinhalkar legal battle (more notorious as the "Paid News" scandal), leading civil society organisations and eminent individuals have approached the Supreme Court to implead themselves into the case. Their intervention application, moved by advocate Prashant Bhushan, minces no words...

-Firstpost.com It is becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He seems to surface in the media every time the UPA government is about to legislate its pet follies, providing intellectual succour to mindless spending and corruption wrapped up in the package of anti-poverty schemes. Yesterday, Sen bobbed up just when the UPA - under siege for every known scam in India - tried to start discussions on...

-The Hindu Chennai: All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has agreed to remove the word ‘mandatory' from a controversial memo it served on 11,500 colleges it oversees for installing Microsoft Office 365. The memo set June 30 as the last date for installing the productivity suite, after the American software giant was awarded a contract last year to provide the colleges with its cloud e-mail and storage offering. Had the mandate not...

-The Hindu   A concern about the Food Security Bill is that legal entitlement has been weakened to mean a passive right to receive whatever the state gives The hallmark of the National Food Security Bill 2011 is that if implemented it will translate into India's first ever right to food legislation, guaranteeing food as a justiciable, legal entitlement to its people. However, in its current form, the Bill fails to evolve a...

-Live Mint Move part of strategy to counter growing incidence of non-communicable diseases; course to be part of 2014 academic curriculum Concerned by the growing incidence of non-communicable diseases (NCD), the government wants to introduce a new, graded subject in school focusing on health education in classes IV to X. The course will be a part of 2014's academic curriculum and is being designed by the National Institute of Health and Family Welfare...