25 MARCH 2015

Ø  Section 66A of the Information Technology Act is unconstitutional in its entirety, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday striking down a “draconian” provision that had led to the arrests of many people for posting content deemed to be “allegedly objectionable” on the Internet. It is clear that Section 66A arbitrarily, excessively and disproportionately invades the right of free speech and upsets the balance between such right and the reasonable restrictions that may be imposed on such right. The Bench turned down a plea to strike down sections 69A and 79 of the Act, which deal with the procedure and safeguards for blocking certain websites and exemption from liability of intermediaries in certain cases, respectively. In the judgment, the court said the liberty of thought and expression was a cardinal value of paramount significance under the Constitution. Three concepts fundamental in understanding the reach of this right were discussion, advocacy and incitement. Discussion, or even advocacy, of a particular cause, no matter how unpopular it was, was at the heart of the right to free speech and it was only when such discussion or advocacy reached the level of incitement that it could be curbed on the ground of causing public disorder.

Ø  Ending a 27-year drought, Kannada actor Sanchari Vijay secured the national award for best actor for his brilliant performance in Naanu Avanalla, Avalu (I am not he…she) directed by B.S. Lingadevaru. He prevailed against actors such as Amir Khan ( PK ) and Shahid Kapoor (Haider ).

Ø  The Union government launched a new platform, in association with Twitter, on Tuesday for direct communication among leaders, government agencies and citizens through tweets and text messages, helping boost e-governance plans. To start with, the service has 16 partners, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi; the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, Chandrababu Naidu, Anandiben Patel, Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee, respectively; the Railway Ministry; and the Bengaluru City Police. Based on Indian technological innovation, Twitter Samvad is dedicated [to], and specially built, for the largest democracy of the world. As part of the Prime Minister’s Digital India initiative, this tweet-powered service enables citizens to be the first to know about the government’s actions by receiving political content in real-time on their mobile devices anywhere in the country. Twitter Samvad is based on a platform provided by ZipDial, an Indian company recently acquired by Twitter, making this its first Indian service launched using indigenous technology.

Ø  Amitav Ghosh on Tuesday emerged as the only Indian author among 10 finalists for this year’s Man Booker International Prize for his contribution to English language writing. Kolkata-born, 58-year-old Ghosh had narrowly missed out on the Booker Prize in 2008 when he was shortlisted for his work ‘Sea of Poppies’

Ø  Court , a little known quadrilingual film, emerged as the best feature film while Kangana Ranaut was adjudged the best actress for her critically acclaimed and commercially successful title role in Vijay Bahl’s Queen at the 62nd National Film Awards. Court , directed by Chaitanya Tamhane, depicts the “mundaneness of judicial procedure” and the “heart-wrenching insensitivity of institutional structures.”

Ø   Novelist Akhil Sharma’s 2014 novel  Family Lifehas won the Folio Prize 2015.  The 43-year old novelist beat writers like Irish novelist Colm Toibin and Scottish writer Ali Smith Coilm to win the £40,000 prize. Family Life , Mr. Sharma’s second novel, took him 13 years to write and was selected by The  New York Times  as one of their Top Ten Books of the Year for 2014.

Ø  A plane operated by the budget carrier of Germany’s Lufthansa crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 on board in France's worst aviation disaster in decades.

Ø  Utah became the first U.S. State to reinstate execution by firing squad amidst a spiralling crisis due to lethal drug shortages faced by U.S. prisons, even as the State’s Governor was on the record describing the procedure as “a little bit gruesome.” According to Republican Governor Gary Herbert, who signed the law approving the use of the firing squad on Monday, the death penalty would be administered in this manner when no lethal injection drugs was available and the latter would remain the “primary method” of executing inmates. Under the law in Utah, inmates would be killed by a firing squad only if the State cannot acquire lethal injection drugs 30 days prior to the scheduled execution date. Since 2010, U.S. correctional facilities have struggled to procure a key drug in the three-drug lethal cocktail administered to death row inmates, sedative sodium thiopental, after its sole U.S. producer, Hospira, took its production plants offline in the face of anti-death penalty campaigns and other obstacles. In a scramble to procure an alternative, numerous U.S. prisons turned towards foreign suppliers, including from Europe and India, although media reports, including in The Hindu , led to the Indian suppliers such as Kayem Pharma and Naari pulling out of the supply chain. After hitting a dead end, U.S. prisons entered a phase of experimenting with different drug protocols, including in States such as Georgia and Missouri, which relied on the use of a massive overdose of animal euthanasia drug pentobarbital. Such manipulations of the drug protocol yielded mixed results, culminating in the botched execution on April 29 last year of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.