Opening a new chapter of charges against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, this time for attempting to subvert the judicial process, the noted danseuse and social activist Mallika Sarabhai claimed that the Chief Minister had “bribed” her lawyers to derail her Public Interest Litigation petition before the Supreme Court on the 2002 communal riots in the State. Ms. Sarabhai told a hurriedly convened media conference on Sunday that an affidavit filed...

As I write this my city Delhi is drowning. It started raining early this morning and within a few hours the city has come to a standstill. The television is showing scenes of traffic snarled up for hours, roads waterlogged and people and vehicles sunk deep in water and muck. The meteorological department records that some 60 mm of rain has fallen in just about 6 hours; 90 mm in 24...

Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck. Some crude clues to the extraordinary...

-The Times of India   Environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan has done well to recast India`s position on climate change. In a signi-ficant departure from her predecessor, Jairam Ramesh, she has rightly emphasised equity as the key principle for future climate negotiations. Given that we cannot get to zero emissions right away with present-day technologies, the individual Indian should have as much right to carbon space as the individual American or European. At...

Nitish orders suspension of investigating officer, two other policemen In yet another incident of police brutality, policemen mercilessly beat up several persons, including women, in Bihar's Nalanda district on Thursday. The incident occurred when a large crowd trooped in front of the Noorsarai police station to protest against the recent disappearance of a young woman Sushma Kumari alias Reena Devi, who is the panchayat secretary. The mob alleged that the investigating officer (IO)...