-The Economic Times A full bench of the Central Information Commission, the final appellate authority on Right to Information (RTI) Act, will on Thursday decide whetherpolitical outfits should come under the purview of the Act. Political parties are yet to show any inclination towards adopting the transparency legislation. Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra and Information Commissioners ML Sharma and Annapurna Dixit would give their verdict on separate appeals by RTI activist...

-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...

-The Economist A new form of radical centrist politics is needed to tackle inequality without hurting economic growth BY THE end of the 19th century, the first age of globalisation and a spate of new inventions had transformed the world economy. But the “Gilded Age” was also a famously unequal one, with America’s robber barons and Europe’s “Downton Abbey” classes amassing huge wealth: the concept of “conspicuous consumption” dates back to 1899....

-Mainstream Weekly Intense and motivated propaganda, powerful national and international diplomatic pressure, verging on pure and simple arms-twisting of the kind the Third World has been facing for decades by means of the active role of the econo-mic hit-men in the policy establishments, huge cash-back lobbying, both in India and abroad, blunt attempts to bamboozle the persons holding key positions in India’s policy establishment through a combination of hissing and kissing...

-The Economic Times How right was the government when it stated that the under-recoveries posed a threat to 'our national economy'? Or when the government says that it gave more to the sector in the form of subsidies than it earned as fuel taxes? The government would also like you to believe that the under-recoveries, dependent as they are on the price of crude in the international market, and the exchange...