-The Indian Express Bangalore: About six months ago, when he appeared in court for the first time after being named by the Bangalore Police in an alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba plot to target local right-wing media personalities, Muthi ur Rehman Siddiqui, 26, a reporter and sub-editor with the Deccan Herald newspaper here, still had the glint of youthful exuberance in his eyes. But now, the first thing that comes to mind on seeing Siddiqui...

-The Hindu Kota, Rajasthan: The sun is about to set over grey-brown slabs in sandstone quarries in Kota district, Rajasthan. Babulal Khairwa sits at the edge of a quarry and attentively hits a taanki, a chisel shaped like a gigantic nail, placed on the stone with a hammer. Babulal hits the stone with the hammer till it cracks in a straight line. Each 2 by 10 square feet foot slab, or...

-The Hindustan Times Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has taken his wrangle with finance minister P Chidambaram and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar over the Centre's job guarantee programme to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's court. Stung by their repeated assertions that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) schemes were having a negative impact on the availability of farm labour, Ramesh shot a note to the PM to "respond to the concerns raised by...

-The Times of India The Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) through an appeal on Monday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to abolish death penalty and spare Veerappan's associates - Gnanaprakash, Simon, Meesekar Madaiah and Bilavendran from the impending execution. These associates of Veerappan were sentenced to death in 2004 in connection with a landmine blast at Palar in Karnataka in 1993 in which 22 police personnel were killed and their mercy...

-The Hindu In protecting husbands from marital rape and khap panchayats from accountability for sexual wrongs, the government has lost an opportunity to change the way in which our society treats women In its eagerness to demonstrate that it is “doing something” about rape in response to the overwhelming protests over the brutal rape and murder of the 23-year-old Delhi student last December, the government has issued an ordinance that is both...