-The Business Standard If Mr Vadra had to count his friends in the real estate business, they would be Corporation Bank, the Haryana government and DLF  Robert Vadra, who is at the centre of a controversy over his property dealings with realty giant DLF and others, began investing in real estate five years ago, in 2007-08. He was already a wealthy man by then, not a struggling businessman who could scrape only...

-The Hindu Property empire was built on soft loans handed out in unusual circumstances, documents show In February, as rumours of the ambitions of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law swirled amidst the heat and dust of the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, her daughter Priyanka moved to scotch speculation about Robert Vadra’s possible political future. “He’s a successful businessman,” the younger Ms. Gandhi said of her husband, “who is not interested in changing...

-NDTV A letter written by BJP president Nitin Gadkari lobbying for contractors building a mega-dam project in Maharashtra has the Congress demanding his resignation, and the BJP on the defensive. Written on July 30 to Water Resources Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal, Mr Gadkari asks for Rs. 400 crores to be released to the contractors hired for the Gosikhurd dam in Vidarbha. The main contractor is Ajay Sancheti, a BJP member of the...

-The Hindu “Environmental impact assessment tends to ignore wider impact on biodiversity” In a move that will bring cheer to wildlife lovers but could dismay industry lobbyists already complaining about the difficulty in obtaining green clearances, the government plans to add biodiversity conservation as a new criterion to grant environmental and forest clearances. “There is no biodiversity clearance till now,” admitted Union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, speaking ahead of the United Nations summit...

-The Hindu Icann, the global authority dealing with domain names, is hastening the threat of monopolisation on the internet through its new scheme to sell generic words L’Oréal has applied for the top level domain (TLD) .beauty to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the global authority dealing with domain names on the Internet. TLDs are what we see on the right side of the dot in domain names...