-The Hindustan Times The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that public officials must decide within three months on applications seeking permission to prosecute government authorities. This order is in context of Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy seeking permission from the Prime Minister's Office to prosecute former telecom minister A Raja in the 2G spectrum allocation scandal. There should be a time frame for deciding on applications seeking prosecution of government officers, the...

Home ministry accepts UIDAI’s biometrics; in case of overlap, National Population Register will prevail The Aadhaar project, which has been in the eye of a storm for its dispute with the home ministry’s National Population Register (NPR), received a shot in the arm on Friday, with the Cabinet Committee on Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) extending its mandate to collect biometrics for a total of 600 million residents of the...

The Jaipur Literary Festival, a giddily chaotic celebration of the written word set on the grounds of a Rajasthan palace, ended in misery and embarrassment today, with the organizers bowing to pressure from local security forces and scotching plans for Salman Rushdie to “appear” at the festival, finally, by video link. Rushdie had already been forced to cancel plans to come to Jaipur after he had received intelligence reports—bogus intelligence,...

-The Hindustan Times   The Delhi High Court will hear the petition filed by Google and Facebook challenging the trial court's order to prosecute them for objectionable content. Google, Facebook and 19 other social networking sites faced legal action for offences of promoting enmity between classes after the government granted sanction to prosecute them on Friday. On Thursday, while refusing to stay criminal proceedings against social networking site Facebook India and search engine Google...

Eleven years ago, Muturkham forests, lying southeast of capital Ranchi, used to be the timber mafia’s busy workplace. No different from the rest of the state, which has lost 50% of forest cover to illegal logging in the last 10 years. Until 1999, when Muturkham’s jungle mafia met ‘Lady Tarzan’. Jamuna Tuddu, 32, a short and stout woman belonging to the Santahl tribe who had studied till Class X, led a...