Natives of Niyamgiri feel that the police is acting as an agent of the Vedanta group, playing dirty tricks to help the company go ahead with its plans to mine bauxite from the sacred hills ONE OF the world’s most controversial mines is back in the spotlight after hundreds protested against renewed efforts to mine Odisha’s Niyamgiri Hills. Dongria Kondh and Niyamgiri supporters held their own ‘public hearing’ in Odisha...

-The Times of India The state CID has written to Facebook asking it to delete certain morphed images of chief minister Mamata Banerjee after a Trinamool Congress supporter lodged a complaint on April 12, citing specific posts and 'objectionable comments' flooding social networking sites.  The CID also wants to know the IP addresses from where the pictures were posted.  It is sure to scare netizens after what happened to Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh...

Nothing illustrates the threat that the FIR raj poses to personal liberty more starkly than the arbitrary manner in which two complaints in the cartoon case were pursued. One complaint was filed against Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra by a Trinamul supporter, accusing him of emailing “obscene” content about the chief minister. The second was lodged by Mahapatra, accusing four persons with Trinamul links of assaulting him. The strikingly divergent police response...

-The Times of India Glaring lapses in the investigation of the case against Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra have come to light, which all but prove that the aim of the probe was to teach the academic a lesson. A senior police officer and a local Trinamool Congress leader literally engineered the case against Prof Mahapatra when none existed. A police officer who did not want to be named said Amit Sardar,...

36 killed in suspicious encounters during anti-Veerappan operations: panel   It is nine years since a fact-finding commission constituted by the National Human Rights Commission and headed by a retired High Court judge found that at least 36 people were killed in suspicious encounters by the Special Task Force (STF) during the anti-Veerappan operations. Yet, the NHRC has not passed final orders on the complaints of atrocities against the STF. The commission, in...