-PTI The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to stay loading of fuel for the nuclear power plant at Kudankulam but agreed to examine the risk associated with the project, saying safety of people living in its vicinity is of prime concern. “Public safety is of prime importance. There are poor people living in the vicinity of the plant and they should know that there life would be protected,” a bench of justices...

Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...

-The Telegraph Swiss pharma company Novartis today told the Supreme Court that if it gets an Indian patent on its anti-cancer drug Glivec, it would continue giving free drugs to 85 per cent patients till 2018 provided prices were left untouched. But the court described its scheme of classifying people on the basis of their incomes as “too complicated” and again urged the company to reduce prices. Whatever the scheme, the end result...

-PTI The row over setting up the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu reached the Supreme Court on Monday with a petition, which sought its directions to restrain the Union government and other authorities from commissioning the controversial project. The Special Leave Petition (SLP) by social activist G Sundarrajan against the Madras High Court's August 31 decision refusing to impose any restraint has claimed that non-implementation of various recommendations formulated by...

-The Indian Express The police today fired teargas shells to disperse anti-nuclear protesters, who again tried to lay siege to the nuclear power plant here demanding a halt to the loading of enriched uranium in the reactor. Defying prohibitory orders, the protesters refused to disperse from the sea shores, 500 metres away from the Kudankulam Nulcear Power project, despite repeated pleas by top police and district officials. As the standoff continued this morning,...