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With the explosive whistleblower revelation that Trump allegedly threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine to get dirt on the family of Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced the launching of a formal impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States. Speaking at the Capitol Tuesday evening, Pelosi said that Trump’s “enlistment of a foreign power to intervene in a U.S. election” amounts to a “betrayal of his oath of office, of our national security, and of the integrity of our elections.”

On September 24, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom delivered a historic verdict, a verdict which not only consolidated the core ethos and conventions of democracy, but also echoed the sentiments of Professor A.V. Dicey on Rule of Law, which still reverberates in the corridors of the Balliol College, Oxford University, situated not more than sixty miles from the place where the historic verdict was delivered.

BHOPAL: In the last 24 hours, three significant developments have happened relating to the honey-trap scandal, currently rocking Madhya Pradesh. The most important and sensational development is the disclosure that more than a dozen IAS officers are involved in the scandal. Top police sources indicated that soon the names of those IAS officers will be disclosed by the SIT, which has been entrusted the inquiry. The second important development relates to the change in the head of SIT. Initially, Srinivas Verma was appointed as the head of the SIT, but within 24 hours, for reasons known to the government, Sanjeev Shami, a senior IPS officer, was given the assignment. Shami is regarded as a tough and professionally sound officer. Immediately after his appointment, he visited Indore.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Election time sees the Congress leaders in Kerala at their bickering best.

Racism in the United States has two fundamental aspects. One is systemic, the other ideological. The systemic aspect has numerous and pervasive forms, including unequal wages, working conditions, access to financing, education, housing, medical care, and environmental protection, where the capitalists impose harsher conditions on African Americans and other people of colour than on white people.

Jeremy Corbyn accused Boris Johnson of disdain for democracy and called on the Prime Minister to quit now after the Supreme Court ruled today that his attempt to suspend Parliament for five weeks was illegal.

Over the last few years, the issue of independence of judiciary in India has been in constant public domain and for good reasons, particularly after the landmark press conference of the four senior-most judges on 12th January, 2018, who decried the executive interference in judiciary. Ironically, one of the judges in the four judges’ press conference was the current Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, under whose watch, the edifice of the independent and impartial judiciary has almost crumbled. Before I get into the recent developments, let us first understand what is the meaning of independence of judiciary.

India was a founding member of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919. It has been a permanent member of its governing body since 1922. At the time of ILO’s centenary, India, the world’s largest democracy, has not ratified two of its core conventions—Convention 89 on Freedom of Association and Right to Organise of 1948 and Convention 98 on Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining of 1949. This, despite Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru making a solemn promise at the Fourth Asian Regional Conference of ILO in India on 13 November 1957 that as one of its 44 founding members India would fully honour the labour standards set by the ILO.

India needs a new culture of opposition politics. In a democracy, opposition is supposed to play the role of a corrective role in the conduct of governance. ‘Corrective’ implies that it has to constructively intervene to correct the course. But unfortunately, opposition now means blind opposition to whatever the government or the ruling party does. Opposition now means a certain antagonism bordering on hatred.

Weekly Round-Up of Major Decisions of the Courts in India as also Legal Policy Developments