-The Times of India   The finance ministry is devising a voluntary tax disclosure scheme that could provide amnesty to people who have stashed unaccounted money in tax havens and other jurisdictions abroad by charging them a "levy". Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, after a meeting with industry captains recently, activated a committee on black money set up last year to work out a scheme on voluntary disclosure. This scheme will allow corporates and...

-The Times of India   It is known to most media watchers that Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the company that publishes The Hindu, is caught in a bitter family feud. N Murali, who recently retired as managing director of the company, wrote a farewell letter to the employees of the company, lamenting that the Hindu's rich tradition of credibility, objectivity, balance and editorial primacy had of late been compromised. Later, in an...

-PTI   The South Korean based Posco wants to exchange high alumina content iron ore with low alumina content mineral within the country Though Posco had agreed not to insist on the import clause in the lapsed memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Orissa government, it wanted swapping of iron ore within the country. “Posco-India has given its consent to delete import clause from the lapsed MoU. However, it wants swapping of iron ore within...

The best thing about Indian politicians is that they make you feel you are a better person. Not surprisingly, Indians often derive their moral confidence not through the discomfort of examining their own actions, but from regarding themselves as decent folks looted by corrupt, villainous politicians. This is at the heart of a self-righteous middle-class uprising against political corruption, a television news drama that reached its inevitable climax in Delhi on...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...