On May 23, the president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, laid the foundation stone of a bridge being built across the river Ravi, linking Jammu and Kashmir with Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Ten days later, she was in Rajasthan, inaugurating the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. For both trips she had to travel far from her place of residence, which — given her position — would have involved careful planning beforehand,...

Governments are censoring digital content on the ground that it infringes intellectual ­property rights or offends people. Can they be stopped? It’s a bit of Iraq and Afghanistan out there on the Internet. Just like the invasion of Iraq was lies, deceit and regime change as George W Bush chased illusory weapons of mass destruction in that hapless country, on the Internet, too, there is an element of fabrication and duplicity...

Among the people who are waiting for the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee (OC) to settle their accounts is the Delhi Lokayukta, Justice Manmohan Sarin. Justice Sarin and the OC are in a dispute over the security deposit for a house in Panchsheel Enclave that he had rented out to accommodate foreign delegates. Justice Sarin has not returned Rs 5.36 lakh out of the refundable security deposit of Rs 8.25 lakh to the...

-The Deccan Herald   "CBI can’t be equated with other agencies." The Union cabinet’s recent decision to exclude the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act is wrong and, as widely suspected, ill-motivated. The CBI has been trying to secure such an exemption for long for wrong reasons. The cabinet has acted according to the wishes of the investigative agency and notified its decision. The...

  With Adarsh Society's lawyers pleading before the Bombay High Court that the scam-hit society too deserved consideration for post-facto environmental clearance similar to that to be granted to the Lavasa hill city in Pune, the warning of activists and environmentalists that regularising Lavasa would set a disastrous precedent seems to be coming true. Advocate Mukul Rohatgi stated on Monday that Adarsh and Lavasa cases should be considered on the same grounds....