-The Times of India   MOGRAHAT (SOUTH 24-PARGANAS): The poison that has killed over 170 people on Kolkata's southern fringes flowed like rivers on Tuesday as policemen smashed bhattis and dumped the illegal liquor in dried-up ponds and canals. The don who ruled over the area, Khora Badshah, is a hunted man but is it really an open and shut case? Amid cries of conspiracy from Trinamool Congress leaders, it has not escaped...

The Kandhamal violence of 2008 “meets all the elements of crimes against humanity,” said the report of the Justice-A.P. Shah-headed National People's Tribunal on Kandhamal, which was released here on Saturday. The report recommends the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to re-examine the First Information Reports already registered, to file fresh FIRs where necessary and to recommend remedial measures where trials had been vitiated because of intimidation of witnesses...

A report of the National People's Tribunal on the 2008 riots in Kandhamal, Orissa, is out. The report that runs into 197 pages points out that the brutality of the violence falls within the definition of 'torture' under international law, particularly the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.   According to the tribunal, headed by Justice A P Shah, communal forces used religious conversions as an issue for political mobilisation...

The Gujarat High Court on Thursday directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take over the investigation into the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. Stating that the Gujarat police could not be “relied upon” to conduct an impartial probe, the High Court asked the CBI to consider the case as an “exceptional one having national ramifications.” A Division Bench, comprising Justices Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari, also directed chairman of the High...

-EPW   Will the blatant discrimination against Muslims in the administration of justice ever end? The word secular was inserted into the Preamble of the Indian Constitution by the 42nd amendment in 1976; later on, the Supreme Court, in S R Bommai vs Union of India, held (in 1994) that secularism was an integral part of the basic structure of the Constitution. And yet, it has been a long time coming – Indian...