Lost in connection

Most of Turkmenistan is now without mobile phone communications and access to the Internet after the country’s biggest mobile service provider, MTSTurkmenistan, fell foul of the government.

Anonymous attack

On January 4, websites of the Tunisian government were taken offline by a group, which calls itself Anonymous.

Letters

AUTONOMY OR CORRUPTION?

Maoists in fray

Have the elections prompted the Maoist rebels to enter the fray? Union Home Minister P Chidambaram went as far as to say that he was happy if the leftwing extremists become a part of the democratic system.

Poll statistics

Across the 24 districts, 201,789 nominations were filed for the 52,786 posts in four categories.

PESA reservation

The first civil appeal—Union of India versus Rakesh Kumar and Others—opposing PESA reservation was filed in the Jharkhand High Court in 2005.

Reserved for no one

The rapidly changing demography of Jharkhand, a state carved out of Bihar in 2000, has given a disturbing twist to the panchayat elections held in the region after more than three decades. Perhaps for the first time in the country, there were no candidates even to file nominations in a large number of panchayat seats reserved for members of the Scheduled Tribes (ST). No nomination was filed for almost 2,000 posts in the first three rounds of the five-phased panchayat elections.

Uneasy scrutiny

Media activists in Macedonia accused the country’s government of crackdown on free speech after police raided the country’s biggest private television channel, ostensibly on financial grounds.

News Snippets

>> On November 25, a month-long road show kickstarted in the Australian continent.

Atheist in an unholy mess

A Palestinian blogger, who set off an uproar in the Arab world by claiming he was God and hurling insults at Prophet Muhammad, was caught in a sting that used Facebook to track him down.