A bench of the Supreme Court recently said: “When you say it is the world’s oldest profession and when you are not able to curb it by laws, why don’t you legalise it?” Really? While dealing with a PIL filed by Bachpan Bachao Andolan about large scale child trafficking in the country, a Supreme Court bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice AK Pattnaik are reported to have advised the...

To register a formal complaint with the police about snatched or stolen articles is often as tough as getting the item recovered. That’s an old axiom held by a good majority of Delhiites. And statistics go a long way into formalising it as a theory. Here’s from the police’s own record books: out of approximately 14,000 calls received by the Police Control Room (PCR) for “snatchings” this year, till November...

There has been no let-up in the rising trend of food prices. For the week that ended on November 28, the wholesale price index for food articles rose 19.05 per cent over the corresponding period last year. A week earlier, it was at 17.47 per cent. Indeed, Arresting the price rise of essential commodities has been a challenge to the government for quite some time now. Some recent developments have...

A rogue’s gallery of corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs trying to create money out of thin air.  It is impossible to quantify the level of fraud in public spending on wind energy The European wind association does not have a code of conduct for developers A big Danish firm revealed that it was the victim of a 12 million euro fraud The northern trade winds of the Canary Islands have long tempted daredevil windsurfers,...

As protests against the plan to bifurcate Andhra Pradesh continued during the third day of the bandh in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions, agitators in Nellore closed the gates of the Kandaleru reservoir of the Telugu Ganga project for the second consecutive day and stopped release of water to Chennai for some time before irrigation officials intervened and re-opened them. In Vijayawada, Telugu Desam Party leaders, including two MLAs, launched...