-The Indian Express Muzaffarnagar (UP): At Muzaffarnagar, FIRs are piling up. A total of 177 FIRs pertaining to riots were handwritten in three days at a single station. Over a hundred still remain. Dealing with this deluge of complaints is one man entrusted with the task of going through each complaint and processing it into an FIR. He (he did not want to be named) was brought in specifically for rendering...

-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Hindu Questions over advisability & validity of ordinance to protect convicted lawmakers cited as reasons Five days after Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi publicly censured the government, the Union Cabinet, at a brisk 20-minute meeting on Wednesday evening, decided to withdraw the controversial ordinance on convicted lawmakers, as well as the Bill that sought to amend the Representation of the People Act on which it was based. Union Minister of Information and...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The United Nations United Nations independent experts today called on Indian authorities to immediately halt the construction of a massive steel plant in the eastern state of Odisha - formerly known as Orissa - which threatens to displace more than 22,000 people Jagatsinghpur District and disrupt the livelihoods of thousands more in the surrounding area. "The construction of a massive steel plant and port in Odisha by multinational steel corporation POSCO must...