-The Indian Express The Supreme Court Wednesday said it was perturbed by the CBI changing the "heart" of the coal blocks allotment probe status report at the instance of its "masters" and ordered the agency's director to ensure that Law Minister Ashwani Kumar and other ministers do not have access to such reports in the future. The keenly-watched hearing lasted three hours and witnessed the CBI incurring the wrath of the court...

-The Indian Express A sound whistleblowers' protection law is long awaited. It languishes in Parliament at the system's peril Nandi Singh, a resident of a remote village in Assam, was brutally attacked with axes in September 2012 as a result of a complaint filed by him regarding irregularities in the functioning of fair price shops supplying rations under the public distribution system. He succumbed to his injuries on the way to the...

-Live Mint Even as India struggles in efforts to usher in transparency, some panchayats are offering a refreshing contrast Chandana/Jind: Sometime last year, Surendra Singh got a call from a military outpost in Srinagar. The soldier had an urgent inquiry for the 31-year-old sarpanch of Chandana, a village in Haryana's Kaithal district. The man, who hailed from the village, had lost his voter ID card and needed a letter from the...

-The Hindu In a relief to the Centre, the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the government's proposal to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail trade (MBRT) saying the move did not suffer from any unconstitutionality, illegality, arbitrariness or irrationality. A three-judge bench of Justices R.M. Lodha, Madan B. Lokur and Kurian Joseph said "consumer is king and if that is the philosophy working behind the policy then what is wrong...

-The Hindu "Freedom without limits is just a word" -Terry Pratchett Kamlesh Vaswani's PIL seeking to ban the viewing of pornography and make it a non-bailable offence has raised eyebrows. Columnists and social media commentators have greeted the idea with shock, raising issues such as social liberty, sexual freedom, and the fact that the mere banning of pornography might not bring down the incidence of rape. On the surface of it, this sounds...