-The Hindu Kochi: Ten senior CPI(M) leaders including party general secretary Prakash Karat, Polit Bureau member Pinarayi Vijayan and Leader of the Opposition V. S. Achuthanandan have approached the High Court of Kerala on Tuesday for quashing the criminal proceedings initiated against them by the Chief Judicial First Class Magistrate Court, Thiruvananthapuram. The court had earlier issued summons against the petitioners following a complaint filed by by Neyyattinkara P. Nagaraj, which stated...

-The Telegraph Bengal - Defrauded Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company. But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated. Travels across the semi-urban...

-The Times of India BHOPAL: Women health workers in Madhya Pradesh are refusing to distribute condoms in a government-sponsored family planning measure, citing it as an exercise 'against their dignity'. "We are working for the implementation of other schemes and initiatives, but this is awkward. It is against our dignity," said Mithlesh Vishwakarma, president of ASHA (accredited social health activists) workers Association in Damoh district. ASHA workers are either daughters- in-law or...

-The Hindu In the eye of the storm for funding corporate warehousing projects on terms far softer than those offered to poor farmers, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is now blaming the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the transgressions. Following a story in The Hindu, (‘As farmers suffer, NABARD offers soft loans to corporates, ' December 10, 2012), NABARD came under...

-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...