The Supreme Court on Friday pulled up the Kerala government for enacting legislation to circumvent its or High Court judgments. Kerala was the only State where it was telling citizens not to obey the law, said a Bench of Justices D.K. Jain and Anil R. Dave. Hearing an appeal against an interim order of the Kerala High Court staying a provision of the Kerala Public Ways (Restriction of Assemblies and Processions)...

-The Business Standard   The Union government on Thursday approached the Supreme Court with a presidential reference on various issues relating to its recent judgment in the 2G spectrum scam. The apex court, meanwhile, would take up the government's review petition tomorrow. The presidential reference, under Article 143 of the Constitution, and the review petition raise similar issues. The main concern of the government is the perceived interference of the judiciary in the...

-Express News Service   Having waited almost a year for the government to initiate the process of carrying out electoral reforms, Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi has decided to write to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tomorrow to seek his intervention. “I am writing to the Prime Minister tomorrow reminding him of this long-pending thing (electoral reforms). There is a national consultation on the subject which is also pending,” Quraishi said today during the...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, had a sharp, snappy way of putting across what he wanted to say. Some of his eminently quotable quotes include: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice” and “Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious”. But there’s another, less well-known and even more controversial quote also attributed to him: “Let some people...