Team Anna complains that the Lokpal has no administrative control over the CBI and its investigation wing but CBI officials feel that the agency now could be subject to the whims of new master — the three-member Lokpal panel. Besides the elevation of the status of its Director — the Prime Minister, the Leader of Opposition and the Chief Justice or a Judge appointed by him are now on the selection...

The government’s desperate race to redraft the Lokpal bill in time for passage this Parliament session has left political circles uneasy, with even some Opposition leaders conceding the dangers of lawmaking under such abnormal pressure. The Centre too is squirming at this “indecent haste”, prompted by its keenness to avoid another face-off with Team Anna. But it feels it has little choice in a political climate where “confrontationism” is giving the...

-The Business Standard   A data battle is exciting news for us, almost like what breaking news is to many others. We’ve been closely tracking the ‘Curious Case Of West Bengal’s Missing Numbers’ for a few months now. The case is getting more interesting, almost mysterious, as the results of a Right To Information (RTI) petition filed by ISPR Research Fellow Sourjya Bhowmick with the Ministry of Finance show. A few weeks ago,...

Two days after a clash at the proposed Posco site that left one person dead, the Orissa government on Friday shifted senior IAS officer Priyabrata Patnaik from the post of chairman-cum-managing director of Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO) even as the opposition continued to demand a CBI or a judicial probe into the incident. With just about a year to retire, Patnaik, a 1976 batch officer, has been posted as additional...

The Supreme Court on Thursday wanted to know why trial in the murder of then railway minister L N Mishra, who wielded considerable political clout being close to then PM Indira Gandhi, in a bomb attack in Samastipur on January 2, 1975 was dragging in the lower court even after 37 years. A 27-year-old advocate, who was arrested in the case and chargesheeted, is now a frail 64 year-old and has...