-Rediff.com   Police personnel involved in fake encounter killings should be awarded death sentence and hanged, the Supreme Court has said. A bench of justices Markandeya Katju and C K Prasad said that police personnel as custodians of law are expected to protect people and not eliminate them as contract killers. "Fake encounter killings by cops are nothing but cold-blooded brutal murder, which should be treated as the rarest of rare offence...

The Centre today took the extraordinary step of advising media to be “responsible” and not to “demonise” a different point of view, reflecting an assessment that the prevailing sense of drift was severely affecting legislative and administrative processes. Three senior cabinet ministers — Salman Khurshid (law), Kapil Sibal (telecom) and Ambika Soni (information and broadcasting) — appealed to the media to put things in perspective instead of sensationalising every issue without...

-The Telegraph   A vigilance court here today ordered investigation into Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy’s role in a palm oil import deal when he was the finance minister in the K. Karunakaran government in 1992. Chandy today offered to step down and face the case “legally and morally” but was restrained from doing so by leaders of the Congress and other ruling UDF constituents as he was not chargesheeted, sources said. “I...

-PTI   In fresh trouble for former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, the special Lokayukta court today issued summons to him and 14 others to appear before it on August 27 in connection with a private complaint against them alleging denotification of lands favouring his family members. Pronouncing the order on the second complaint by advocate Sirajin Basha, Judge Sudhindra Rao said Yeddyurappa and others have been directed to appear on...

The Supreme Court will pronounce its verdict on Tuesday on a batch of appeals filed by the Tamil Nadu government and others against a Madras High Court order declaring as unconstitutional the amended law to defer implementation of the Uniform System of School Education (USSE) this year. A three-judge Bench of Justices J.M. Panchal, Deepak Verma and B.S. Chauhan had reserved verdict on August 4 after marathon arguments for six days....