From October 1, internet users in India must manually renew all their subscription-based services such as phone bills, OTT platform subscriptions and systematic investment plans, among other services. This is a consequence of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) new rules on auto-debit transactions that prevent merchants from automatically charging customers’ credit and debit cards […]
Appearing before the Supreme Court, Zakia Jafri’s lawyer Kapil Sibal has been arguing that the special investigation team’s closure report into whether certain prominent persons can be held responsible for the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat was not justified. Zakia’s husband and Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was one of 68 people killed during the Gulberg […]
Days after Prabhakar Sail, a witness in the Aryan Khan drugs case claimed that he was made to sign blank papers by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), another witness in a separate drugs case on Wednesday levelled a similar allegation against the agency’s officials, including its Mumbai zonal director Sameer Wankhede. The witness, Shekhar Kamble, […]
The Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports has said it has no information on public requests – and RTI documents show that the ministry hastily issued a circular on the renaming after Modi’s tweet. Amidst euphoria over the Indian men’s hockey team’s brilliant performance at the Tokyo Olympics in August this year, the Narendra Modi […]
Erwin Schrödinger, 1933. Photo: Nobel Foundation/Public Domain. Quantum physics is one of the most remarkable developments of the 20th century. Until the early 1900s or so, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion dominated the study of the physical universe. They were later ‘upgraded’, for the most part, by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, and together, they […]
A clip circulating on social media, purportedly from the new animated film Injustice, appears to show DC superheroes Superman and Wonder Woman destroying all military equipment in Kashmir and this has riled up some Twitter users. In the clip, a narrator’s voice appears to refer to Kashmir as “disputed”. The same voice announces that the superheroes’ action […]
Horrific visuals of police brutality have emerged from an eviction drive in the Sipajhar area of Darrang district of Assam on Thursday, showing policemen opening fire at a man and thrashing him. A photographer, identified by news agency PTI as Bijay Shankar Baniya, is also seen assaulting the man, who appears to have a bullet […]
The Delhi high court on Wednesday sought the Union government and Rakesh Asthana’s stand on a public interest litigation (PIL) challenging the appointment of the Gujarat-cadre IPS officer as Delhi Police Commissioner. A bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh issued notice on a plea by one Sadre Alam and listed the […]
The International Press Institute (IPI) announced on Wednesday that The Wire has won the 2021 Free Media Pioneer Award, as “a leader in India’s digital news revolution and an unflinching defender of independent, high-quality journalism”. “We are extremely proud to recognise The Wire as this year’s IPI-IMS Free Media Pioneer. The Wire is a leading […]
In Kailash Mukti Dham, one of the two crematoriums in Amreli town in Gujarat, four furnaces lie in different states of wreckage. The iron grille that holds bodies melted away in the fire from pyres that burned without a pause. “Pyres were burning for 24 hours every day for a month,” said Maganbhai, a farmer […]
By Siddharth Varadarajan The registry of any court is where a citizen’s quest for justice begins and the Supreme Court of India is no exception. As of August 2, 2021, the total number of pending matters is 69,476, and every month that figure rises by around 600. The court’s 26 judges deal with the law but it […]
Herschelle Gibbs last played any form of international cricket in 2010. Known for his aggressive strokeplay, the South African had made quite a name for himself during his playing days. He’s had a fairly modest presence in the public eye since, though, and the last time he’d made headlines in India was a couple of […]
The education qualification of the new minister of state for home, Nisith Pramanik, are conspicuously missing on the home affairs website. However, the website displays the educational qualifications of Nityanand Rai and Ajay Kumar Mishra, two other junior ministers in the home ministry. The youngest minister in the Modi government and the first-ever Union minister […]
As opposition parties show rare unity in their resolve to corner the Union government on the Pegasus issue, the BJP remains ostrich-like, with its head buried in the sand. It continues to describe Pegasus spyware scandal as “manufactured matters”. This is when responsible democracies around the world are mounting ever more pressure on Israel, as […]
Rajya Sabha member, John Brittas, has moved the Supreme Court seeking a court-monitored probe into the snooping of activists, politicians, journalists and constitutional functionaries using Israeli spyware Pegasus. A massive political uproar has erupted after 17 media organisations reported that the Pegasus spyware was being used to conduct surveillance on about 300 Indians, including ministers, political leaders, […]
The telephone numbers of more than 60 women – homemakers, lawyers and school teachers, journalists, scientists, civil servants and even friends of politicians – figure in the leaked database of probable surveillance targets selected by an Indian agency that uses Pegasus spyware, a count by The Wire has established. The names of some of these women have […]
Indian pharmaceutical giant Bharat Biotech’s ambitious plans to sell millions of doses of its highly-priced vaccine, Covaxin, to Brazil all but crashed on Saturday after the National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) decided to scrap the company’s application for emergency use authorisation (EUA) In a unanimous decision, the executive board of the Brazilian regulator declared that […]
It was a proposition that would change everything. Two 20-something Israeli entrepreneurs who had been running a small customer service start-up for mobile phones were at a client meeting in Europe in 2009 when they received a visit from law enforcement officials. The entrepreneurs’ first instinct was fear. Maybe they had done something wrong that […]
New Delhi: Hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi acted to oust Alok Verma from his post as head of the Central Bureau of Investigation at midnight on October 23, 2018, an unidentified Indian agency known to be a user of Pegasus spyware made a note of three telephone numbers registered in his name. For India’s […]
New Delhi: Reports from some websites misquoting, mistranslating, and misinterpreting a Hebrew statement issued by Amnesty International Israel on the Pegasus Project and its leaked database have been seized upon by the Modi government in an attempt to discredit the allegation that an official agency in India might have been snooping on journalists and opposition politicians. In a […]