-EPW Despite curative measures and judgments, undertrials who are poor continue to rot in jails. The public debate over bail to the 2G spectrum accused and the controversy over the parole granted to murder convict Manu Sharma has unfortunately sidestepped a much more pressing concern – the plight of poor undertrial prisoners who have spent years inside jail without being convicted of any offence. A series of Supreme Court judgments over the...

-The Deccan Chronicle   The CBI on Monday filed an interim report in the Supreme Court regarding the alleged encounter killing of Maoist spokesman Cherukuri Raj Kumar alias Azad. The apex court has given time till December 18 to the CBI to file its final report in the case. Sources said scientific evidence and eye-witness accounts back the police version of an exchange of fire which resulted in Azad’s death. CBI joint...

-The Hindu   Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, has set off a firestorm of protest by demanding that ‘internet intermediaries' — specifically in this round, four social networking giants, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft, which enable hundreds of millions of individual users to publish and share on the worldwide web — remove inflammatory content as well as other text and images that might “offend Indian sensibilities.” As in...

-The Hindu   Every award of a lok adalat, including an order recording a settlement between the parties in a ‘cheque bouncing case' under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, is deemed a civil court decree, and as such it is executable by a civil court, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. A Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and J. Chelameswar said: “Section 21 of the Legal Services Authorities Act does not...

We have five million children in the labour market, say official figures. Their actual numbers may be four times as many. As a nation, we have failed each one of them…   Millions of our children still labour today, in factories, farms, kilns, mines, homes and city waste dumps, when they should be in school or in a playground. We profoundly fail these children, collectively depriving them of education, play, rest, healthy...