-The Indian Express The debate on the death penalty in India has gained new momentum, and the European Union (EU) is following the discussions with great interest. Under the visionary and far-sighted leadership of thinkers and politicians, Europe has come a long way from being the continent where the guillotine was invented and where death sentences were common under the dictatorships of the first half of the 20th century, to become,...

-Economic and Political Weekly The recent debate on the acceptability of foreign direct investment in the retail sector in India has been mostly political. It is necessary to look into the pros and cons of FDI in retail from a purely economic point of view. This article identifi es the safeguards that should be undertaken before allowing giant multinationals to function in the country. Abhirup Sarkar (abhirup@isical.ac.in) is with the Indian Statistical...

-The Hindu The European Parliament in Strasbourg on Thursday conducted an hour-long debate over the persistence of human rights violations against Dalits in India. While acknowledging the efforts at various levels to eradicate caste discrimination, the Parliament however, expressed alarm at the continually large number of reported and unreported atrocities and widespread untouchability practices, such as manual scavenging. On its previous resolutions on the issue (February 2007 and April 2012), the Parliament noted...

-The Hindu In a sensational development that impacts the Internet, a group of mainly African nations moved and won a resolution accompanied by a set of binding treaty-based International Telecom Regulations (ITRs) at the UN’s World Conference on Internet and Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai. The move was supported by China, Russia and mostly Arab states. At the last count, 89 countries had endorsed the global treaty on telecom regulations by Friday, with nearly...

-The Hindu It’s Russia, China, and Arab states versus E.U., U.S. and Japan; India is silent The December 3-14 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, could collapse if Russia does not back off from its proposal to bring the Internet under the control of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), thereby subjecting the web to inter-governmental regulation. At the conference’s plenary session, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kazakhstan backed the Russian proposal,...