-The Times of India   City-based Public Concern for Governance Trust has decided to provide a platform to citizens who are scared of filing right to information (RTI) applications. The Trust has urged citizens to write to them about the RTI application they want to file and the reasons for it. Acting chairman of the Trust, Bhaskar Misar, said that each application will be studied by their team of legal experts, and if...

-The Indian Express   With UPA constituent Trinamool Congress today joining the Opposition in critising the Communal Violence Bill, the Union government said that the legislation as drafted by the National Advisory Council (NAC) was not final. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was among the eight CMs who stayed away from the National Integration Council (NIC) meeting held in Delhi today, with communal violence on its agenda. Narendra Modi (Gujarat), Nitish Kumar...

A high-level meeting on racism, scheduled to take place later this month under the auspices of the General Assembly, is threatening to split the world body and trigger a North-South confrontation. Expressing unfounded fears the meeting might turn out to be anti- Israel, several Western states, including Canada, Germany, the United States, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Austria, have indicated they will not participate in the meeting. The boycott...

-The Telegraph   Six children, aged between four and 10 years, died at the Malda Medical College and Hospital in the past 24 hours amid allegations that they were not treated on time and were made to wait by the doctors on duty. The hospital authorities, however, claimed that the children had been brought in very critical conditions. The Malda district magistrate has ordered an inquiry into the deaths at the hospital, which...

-The Times of India   What prompted the Comptroller and Auditor General from not quantifying the losses to the exchequer in the KG Basin contract and Air India decisions may never be known. But from the way the federal auditor conducted itself on the day the reports were tabled one thing was clear-- there seems to be a rethink about the posture adopted by the constitutional authority in recent months. From its almost devil-may-care...