-The Telegraph The Supreme Court today said a public servant facing corruption charges need not be heard before the competent authority decides on sanctioning prosecution. “…the person for whose prosecution the sanction is sought is not required to be heard before a decision in the matter. What is required to be seen is whether the facts placed before it, which, in a given case, may include the material collected by the complainant...

-The Economic Times   The Supreme Court has pulled up the Prime Minister's Office for taking 16 months to decide on an application from Janata Party PresidentSubramaniam Swamy to prosecute then telecom minister A Raja.  However, a bench comprising Justices AK Ganguly and GS Singhvi appeared to absolve Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of any personal blame on the ground that he could not be expected to go into details of every case before...

Behave well, step out of jail. Select inmates of Tihar jail can now work outside the high-security walls of Asia’s biggest prison, provided, of course, they have not violated jail manuals and their conduct has been good. The inmates will have to come back to their cells at night. The move to allow well-behaved prisoners to work outside the jail complex follows a recent nod from the Delhi government to a rehabilitation plan...

-The Indian Express   As they were produced before the media following their surrender before the police at Kanker on Monday evening, top Naxals for the first time admitted publicly what has been an unconfirmed rumour in Bastar — the insurgents are forced to undergo vasectomy by their leaders, mostly based in Andhra Pradesh. All the four men who surrendered on Monday had undergone the operation. Three women Naxals also surrendered on Monday. “This...

On a wall on Station Road, among posters of Khoonkar Darinde and The Dirty Picture, Amitabh Bachchan looks out of a row of yellow-and-red posters and says, “Do boond har baar.” Here in Moradabad, the town in western Uttar Pradesh that till recently exported, besides its intricate brassware, strains of the deadly polio virus, the posters have been around for long. The writing on the wall was clear: this was...