-The Indian Express Chandigarh: Slamming the Punjab government for sponsoring "xenophobia", the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday set aside its "discriminatory" rules, wherein it had allowed additional weightage to rural students for government jobs. A Full Bench comprising Justices Hemant Gupta, Ajay Tewari and R N Raina held the rules framed by Punjab as "illegal, unconstitutional" and beyond its "legislative competence". "State sponsored xenophobia is constitutional anathema and the principle...

-The Indian Express A nationwide study by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to examine the enrolment, access and retention of children with disabilities (CWD) has revealed that while 99 per cent of these children liked attending regular schools, 57 per cent teachers were not trained to understand their special needs. The study has found that special needs of children with mental illnesses were "neither being identified nor...

-The Hindu "Animal behaviour," was the unusual language the Supreme Court deployed recently. The context for the cryptic remarks was the gruesome lathi-charge on protesting teachers, predominantly women, engaged on contract by the Bihar government, and the attacks on a woman who sought police intervention in a case of assault. The police carry a long and ignominious record of resort to indiscriminate force to quell peaceful protesters, which peaked in the...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Wednesday granted anticipatory bail to a senior bank official accused of molesting a teenage girl, saying that "he is a high-profile person and has been exposed to humiliation already". Joginder Singh, a deputy general manager with the Oriental Bank of Commerce, was booked by the police for allegedly molesting a 16-year-old girl in the lift of his residential building in Vile Parle on...

-The Hindu Police do not deny that it was a case of death in police custody, but say they exercised Restraint Kolkata: The death of a State committee member of the Students Federation of India (SFI), students' wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), allegedly in police custody has created a stir here and raised fresh questions about police excesses in the State. Sudipta Gupta, who completed his post-graduation from the Rabindra...