13 more people died due to the biting cold in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, taking this season's toll to 81. Lucknow recorded a minimum of 3.4 degrees celsius. Bareilly was at 3.2, Allahabad and Gorakhpur were marginally warmer. The national capital Delhi shivered at 5 degrees as icy winds lashed the city. Schools in both states remain closed for another week. Further north, farmers in Punjab are among the hardest hit...

Onion hubs were raided across the country today and officials claimed prices tumbled Rs 5-10 as a result of the income-tax department’s action a day after the Centre urged states to counter hoarding. Calcutta’s Sealdah wholesale mart and Asansol were among the places in Bengal that saw the swoops. Similar action was seen in several towns in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had written to...

Taking on the Department of Information Technology and Administrative Reforms, under which the state information commission falls, Punjab CIC RI Singh asserted that the rules framed by the Punjab government were in conflict with the RTI Act. “The powers to make the rules have been vested with the government to carry out the provisions of this Act and not to thwart them,” he said. Singh said although a formal direction to...

The Raipur sessions court judgment against civil liberties defender and health activist Binayak Sen has provoked outrage. His two-year long detention had drawn protests from the world over. The only substantial charge against Sen is that he passed on three letters from Narayan Sanyal, an undertrial, suspected -- but not yet proved -- to be a Maoist, to the Maoist leadership. It takes several leaps of imagination, or nasty prejudice, to...

The sentencing of Dr. Binayak Sen involves unverified charges, and unreasonable and unconstitutional findings. The constitutional validity of the charges of sedition and conspiracy that were used to implicate rights activists such as Binayak Sen merely for their anti-establishment political thoughts needs to be challenged. The action ridicules the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression. The sections of the Indian Penal Code that deal with “conspiracy to wage war against the government”...