-PTI NAGPUR: Calling for corporate funding to political parties be stopped forthwith, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechuri today said instead the money should be donated to the Election Commission which can use it to help the candidates in their poll campaigns.  "The EC can help the candidates by providing them vehicles, fuel, drivers and also publish their posters and provide printed election material. This way all the candidates of respective parties...

-The Hindu Journalists need to adopt a set of integrity measures in order to police the boundaries between the market and political power   Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and the world’s wealthiest woman, is seeking three board seats following her purchase of 18.7 per cent of Fairfax which owns most papers in Australia not controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. There has already been considerable upheaval in two of the Fairfax papers...

-Kafila.org Almost a century ago, Katherine Mayo published a book titled ‘Mother India’ that criticized the Indian way of living, and Rudyard Kipling  spoke of the ‘White Man’s Burden’. These writings reflected the colonial perspective that what colonizers did was in the best interest of the colonized people. Consequently, most well-meaning citizens of colonial powers were alienated from the horrible plight of the colonized. Purpose well served – unopposed exploitation. Years later,...

-The Times of India   India's GDP growth rate may have dropped in the past few years but that has had little impact on the bottomlines of the country's leading political parties. The coffers of the main parties have been swelling, with the richest amongst them, the ruling Congress, having made a cool Rs 1,662 crore in the last five years till 2011-12 and the BJP in second place with Rs 852...

-The Telegraph Union food minister K.V. Thomas today claimed the Bengal government had distributed only a small fraction of foodgrain specially allotted last year for 10 backward districts, drawing a sharp rebuttal from the state, as another confrontation with the Centre unfolded over figures. Thomas’s comment came days after Union home minister P. Chidambaram had voiced concern over Bengal’s “culture of violence” and cited casualty figures that were contested by the Mamata...