NIIRA RADIA — owner of PR company Vaishnavi Communications, among others — is not merely a fixer in the old sense of the word. She is a thermometer reading for a very ill society. In April this year, a clutch of mysterious documents had made their way to several media houses. At face value the documents seemed a synopsis of phone conversations between Niira — a powerful lobbyist for Mukesh...

The Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)-BJP alliance has won more than four-fifths of the Bihar assembly seats, but there is one unusual aspect to this landslide. The alliance got a little less than two-fifths of the votes cast. Why should this be unusual? Check out the accompanying chart and you will find that other wins of similar magnitude in terms of seats have invariably been the result of substantially larger vote shares. The comparisons...

The people are showing who the boss is. The weapon in their hands is the internet, which, in the last five days, has seen frantic activism against "power brokering" by journalists in collusion with corporate groups and top government politicians. It all began with the publication of sensational tapes related to the 2G spectrum scam by two magazines over the weekend. Two high-profile journalists, Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, whose names...

Business was derailed in Parliament for the tenth day on Thursday as Opposition and the Treasury benches vociferously raised matters of corruption leading to adjournment of both the Houses, causing the public exchequer well over Rs 60 crore in the winter session till now. Amid pandemonium, both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on Thursday were adjourned for an hour barely a minute after they met and later adjourned for the...

While many U.S. residents prepare for their annual Thanksgiving feast Thursday, one in six are at risk of hunger – including a quarter of all children in the country. Globally, 925 million people, or a little less than 15 percent of the world population, is undernourished. Ironically, Washington's efforts to alleviate hunger abroad may be more successful than at home, analysts say. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's estimate last week that 49...