-The Hindu "Why this selective concern about encounter killings in Gujarat - these happen all over the country," pleaded Gujarat's lawyer at a Supreme Court hearing of veteran journalist B.G. Verghese's public interest petition on 22 unexplained police killings in that state. When a 13-year-old boy was abducted from a Delhi jhuggi by Gujarat police officials on a whim, the State government's defence was first that the boy was Bangladeshi, next that...

-The Hindu Extraordinarily, more than a dozen senior police officers in Gujarat are in jail or facing prosecution, in connection with cold-blooded Murders dressed up as encounter deaths. Darshan Desai traces the hand of politics in the extrajudicial killings. At a recent function in the state capital, Gandhinagar, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi warned the Central Bureau of Investigation against becoming a tool in the hands of the Congress-led union government. He...

-NDTV A year and a half after Mamata Banerjee's government ordered the removal of most English-language newspapers from all state run libraries, the Calcutta High Court has undone the decision. The court today ruled that the most-circulated newspapers in West Bengal, which include The Telegraph and Anand Bazar Patrika, must be made available for readers. In March, the government had banned all English dailies and several other vernacular ones from more than 2000...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: A person facing Murder trial can contest elections, become an MP and even a minister in the Union government, but pendency of a criminal case will not entitle him to a job in the lowest rung of a police force. This is the gist of the Supreme Court's ruling, which set aside concurrent judgments of the Central Administrative Tribunal and the Delhi high court allowing a...

-The Hindu That predators continue to enjoy impunity for crimes committed against women is now common knowledge. But less known is the fact that the worst perpetrators are often those most intimately known to women, or that the latter are vulnerable in consequence to life-long health-related risks. These frightening revelations are contained in a recent World Health Organisation report, issued in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical...