-The Hindu "Why this selective concern about encounter killings in Gujarat - these happen all over the country," pleaded Gujarat's lawyer at a Supreme Court hearing of veteran journalist B.G. Verghese's public interest petition on 22 unexplained police killings in that state. When a 13-year-old boy was abducted from a Delhi jhuggi by Gujarat police officials on a whim, the State government's defence was first that the boy was Bangladeshi, next that...

-The Hindu Extraordinarily, more than a dozen senior police officers in Gujarat are in jail or facing prosecution, in connection with cold-blooded murders dressed up as encounter deaths. Darshan Desai traces the hand of politics in the extrajudicial killings. At a recent function in the state capital, Gandhinagar, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi warned the Central Bureau of Investigation against becoming a tool in the hands of the Congress-led union government. He...

-Kafila.org Over 115 women have signed a letter seeking an apology from Ms. Meenakshi Lekhi for her sexist slandering of deceased Ishrat Jahan in a television channel. The letter has also been sent to the Chairperson of the National Commission for Women for appropriate action. As the noose is tightening around the conspirators who cynically and coldly planned and executed the killing of teenaged Ishrat Jahan and three other people in 2004,...

-The Hindustan Times The audacious ambush and bloody massacre of more than two dozen political leaders and their security guards in Darbha valley of Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh, raises again profoundly important questions about the legitimacy of violence as an instrument to battle injustice and oppression. Resistance to injustice is widely endorsed as the highest human duty in most cultures, but the debate is about the legitimacy of deploying violence in...

-The Telegraph Imphal: A Manipuri widow's cry for justice rang out during the 23rd session of the UN Human Rights Council this morning, as she questioned gaps in UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns's report on the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. Neena Ningobam, who represented the Extrajudicial Execution Victim Families' Association, Manipur, of which she is the secretary, and the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) at...