Reports

The season of scandals is still on for the Indian news media. This time it is about the tall claims that Indian newspapers often make. The Consumer Complaints Council (CCC) of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has upheld complaints against advertisements of three newspaper brands Prabhat Khabar, DNA and Nai Dunia. All advertisements concerned were released in September this year. The case against Prabhat Khabar was that it had staked claim to the number one position in Jharkhand...

The usually accepted argument among psychologists had been that marriage generally reduces illegal and aggressive behaviours in men. There were, however, disagreements over the reason for this. A group of researchers now says that the association is a function of matrimony itself or as well as less "antisocial" men being simply more likely to get married. The team of researchers from the Michigan State University led by behaviour geneticist S Alexandra Burt examined the data of 289 pairs of male...

Indians don't see any institution as clean. From political parties and NGOs to media and Army, everyone's perceived to be dirty. At least, that's what the 2010 Global Corruption Barometer of Transparency International (TI) has found. With headlines screaming every other day of this scam being unearthed or another, it seems muck all around for people. Worse, no one seems to come out as clean. Only the degree of cleanliness varies. The worst of the lot, needless to say are political parties. On a...

Given the rate at which scams are being uncovered these days, it isn't surprising that India comes across as the ninth most corrupt nation in the world. No, that's not Arundhati Roy's assertion, but that of the 2010 Global Corruption Barometer released on Thursday. In India, 54 per cent of the people have reported paying a bribe to receive attention from at least one of nine different service providers in the past 12 months. The services include education, judiciary, medical services, police...

Corruption has increased over the last three years, say six out of 10 people around the world, and one in four people report paying bribes in the last year. These are the findings of the 2010 Global Corruption Barometer, a worldwide public opinion survey on corruption, released Thursday, International Anti-Corruption Day, by Transparency International (TI). Views on corruption trends are most negative in Europe and North America, where 73 per cent and 67 per cent of people respectively think...

Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera is being used as a “bargaining tool” by Qatar to further its position internationally, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks claim. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has, however, described it as an American assessment only. In a cable sent on November 19, 2009, Ambassador Joseph E LeBaron wrote that the station could be used "as a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries, particularly those soured by al-Jazeera's broadcasts, including the United States"...

The pain shot up to his head faster than he could think. It seemed like a powerful electric shock. Hussain, a 26-year-old, still doesn't have words for it. He got just one, and couldn't take it. Hussain is a victim of Malaysia's judicial caning. Across the Southeast Asian country, government officials rampantly resort to this tactic for torture. The metre-long rattan canes, swishing into the flesh of prisoners up to 160 kilometres per hour, tears into the naked flesh of prisoners, turning the...

Two more walls collapsed on Wednesday inside Pompeii's 2,000-year-old archaeological site, the second such incident in as many days. The two walls collapsed early Wednesday morning, in all likelihood because of heavy rains over the past several days, the office of Pompeii's archaeological superintendent said in a statement. The collapse involved an area 2m high and 3m wide of the wall along one of the site's main streets, the Via Stabiana. Another small chunk of a side room in the "House of the...

Twenty-year-old Nita was caught on an isolated road on a motorcycle with her boyfriend. She was whisked away by the Sharia police. The next morning the head lecturer at her campus lectured her, and told her mother that Nita should be stoned to death. Nita blurted out, “Sir, I was only trying to look for a shortcut, and I should be stoned for that? What about the officers who raped me last night?” Nita was apprehended by the Sharia police (Wilayatul Hisbah, WH) in January 2010 for the crime of...

Interpol has placed Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, on a red notice wanted list over allegations of sexual misbehavior by a Swedish prosecutor, the police organisation has announced on its website. The notice said Assange, 39, is wanted for “sex crimes” on an arrest warrant brought by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. Interpol is based in Lyon, France. The Red Notice does not amount to an arrest warrant. It asks people to contact...