-The Times of India NEW DELHI: All government servants may get a 'shield' from prosecution as the Centre has okayed changes in the Prevention of Corruption Act to make it mandatory for investigating agencies like CBI to take its prior approval before initiating an investigation against them. Union minister of state for personnel Jitendra Singh on Thursday said the purpose behind mandating prosecution sanction for government officers under the anti-graft law was...

-The Hindu New Delhi: As videos of the alleged police encounter of eight SIMI men who broke out of the Bhopal Central Jail continue to raise demands for a judicial probe, a series of Supreme Court judgments show that the law is heavily, even fatally, loaded against police officers found guilty of 'fake encounters'. One of the judgments even recommends death penalty to “trigger-happy” cops and compares them to Nazi war criminals...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court had recently said security forces had no inherent right to shoot people, which suggests that yesterday's killing of the eight Simi operatives by Madhya Pradesh police went against that ruling. The court had held that even if a person was seen carrying weapons in a "disturbed" area, it did not automatically give the security forces the right to shoot him. Even the army had no blanket...

-The Hindu The number of FIRs registered against personnel is few and far between, show new data from NCRB New Delhi: India may not have enough safeguards to protect its citizens from human rights violations by the police, official data suggest. As many as 35,831 cases were registered against the police with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in 2015-16, a figure that experts say is highly under-reported. And only 94 first information...

-The Hindu The findings point to corruption, politics as the adversaries of journalists working in small towns. Reporting in India can be a dangerous business as a report compiled by an independent watchdog, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), has observed. Twenty-seven journalists have died under unnatural circumstances since 1992; increasingly, the victims are from small towns. There have been zero convictions, raising questions about the governments’ intent to allow journalists...