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NEW DELHI: Consensual heterosexual relation between adults, including pre-marital sex, is no offence except in cases where the partners are liable to be charged for “adultery”, ruled the Supreme Court.

It said the courts attach a lot of importance to personal autonomy and a person indulging in an immoral act need not necessarily be a culprit in the eyes of law. “Morality and criminality are non co-extensive,” said a Bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justices Deepak Verma and B S Chauhan on Wednesday.

The SC said in the present social milieu, some view pre-marital sex as an attack on the centrality of marriage while a significant number see nothing wrong in it. This conflict of opinion on morality did not make pre-marital sex an offence, it ruled.

“Notions of social morality are inherently subjective and criminal law cannot be used as a means to unduly interfere with the domain of personal autonomy,” it said.

This clear finding and the judicial logic supporting it got substantial space in the apex court’s judgment on Wednesday quashing 23 complaint cases against South…..

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BANGALORE: “I’m not a man. There’s no way I could have indulged in sexual activities with women. Do a potency test on me”. That’s the sum and substance of Swami Nityananda’s startling statements to CID sleuths soon after he was brought to Bangalore after being arrested in Himachal Pradesh.

However, CID sleuths decided to ignore him, believing he was only trying to sidetrack the investigation. The swami’s passport clearly mentions his gender as male, not transgender. The CID plans to take a call on this after receiving the report of the Forensic Science Laboratory, Hyderabad, on a CD that has 36 video clips of Nityananda with at least five different women. The CID had sent the CD to Hyderabad for analysis and hopes to get the report on Friday, sources said.

The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) issued a circular to all airports to check items carried by the godman when he travelled in and out of India. According to information collected by DRI, Nityananda would carry gold-plated worship material like kamandalas and slippers to the US.

While returning, he would bring back 24-carat gold of the same size and weight. The look-out notice mentions his gender as male, sources said…..

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NEW DELHI, April 30 (Xinhua) — India and Pakistan made a big step forward toward improving bilateral relations after the prime ministers of the two countries hold talks Thursday in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu, with both sides showing strong political will to normalize ties.

Indian official sources said the two countries have agreed to resume foreign ministerial level talks following the resumption of dialogue at foreign secretarial level in February this year in New Delhi.

Compared with the meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani in the Egyptian Red Sea resort Sharm el-Sheikh in July last year, this meeting, held at the sidelines of the 16th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), showed clear positive evolution of Indo-Pakistan relations.

The two countries resumed official dialogue in February for the first time since India cut talks with Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks in November 2008. The foreign secretarial meeting in the Indian capital, without bringing about concrete agreement, nevertheless laid the basis in both public opinion and diplomatic mechanism for the success of this Singh-Gilani meeting.

According to Indian media reports, the two countries will hold second foreign secretarial level talks in Islamabad in the coming weeks, in preparation for foreign ministerial meeting possibly to be held in New Delhi in the near future. Analysts say political will and pragmatic needs of the two countries are the groundwork for the success of the meeting on Thursday….

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TAIXING, China — The screams of the children inside the kindergarten could be heard out in the street.

When people ran in to investigate, they found what one witness said was a scene “too horrible to imagine” — blood everywhere as a knife-wielding man slashed 29 children, two teachers and a security guard Thursday in the second such school attack in China in two days.

Experts called it a copycat rampage triggered by similar incidents Wednesday and last month. They said the wave of school attacks falls amid poor care for the mentally unstable and growing feelings of social injustice in the fast-changing country.

All the students were aged 4 or 5 years old. Thursday’s attack at the Zhongxin Kindergarten left five students badly injured, two of them in critical condition, in the eastern city of Taixing, said Zhu Guiming, an official with the municipal propaganda department. Two teachers and the security guard were also hurt. Initially officials had reported that 28 children had been hurt but they later realized they had miscounted.

The official Xinhua News Agency identified the attacker as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old unemployed man. He pushed his way into the classroom with an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife after two teachers and a security guard failed to stop him. No motive was given.

Xu had been a salesman in a local insurance company until he was fired in 2001. Since then, he has remained jobless, Xinhua said.

A witness to the early morning attack said people outside heard screams coming from the three-story building and rushed inside.

“It was too horrible to imagine. I saw blood everywhere, and kids bleeding from their heads,” a visibly shaken Hu Tao told The Associated Press hours later.

“Some of them could not open their eyes because of the blood,” he said.

Hu, who owns a small restaurant across the street from the school, said a delivery man used a fire extinguisher to knock Xu down.

Set in a side street off the main avenue of the heavily industrialized city, the kindergarten has a whimsical European-style castle turret rising above its gate and a cartoon-like bunny by the entrance, which was sealed off by police tape….

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The massive oil spill pouring from a ruptured oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the coast of Louisiana, threatening an environmental catastrophe in the region.

The first fingers of oily sheen reached the mouth of the Mississippi River on Thursday evening local time, 24 hours ahead of previous estimates by the US Coast Guard

As the sun began to set over the fragile wetlands surrounding the Missippi, the oil was slipping into the South Pass of the river and already lapping at the shoreline in long black lines.

Although US government agencies and BP set up 100,000 feet of booms to protect coastal areas from the slick, rough seas sent five foot waves of oily water over the top of the booms into the river.

The oil slick is on its way to becoming Americas’s worst environmental disaster n decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife in one of the world’s richest marine environments.

Even before the spill neared the coast, wildlife experts said a toxic mix f chemiscals was poisoning the waters of endangered marine life and fisheries, including one of only two breeding grounds world-wide for Atlantic bluefin tuna.

“It is of grave concern,” said David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

Fear turned to fury among local residents as BP, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and sank last week, stood accused of playing down the scale of disaster after as it emerged that five times more oil was surging into the Gulf from the seabed than had been calculated previously…..

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VATICAN CITY — As the sexual abuse crisis continues to unfold in the Roman Catholic Church, with more victims coming forward worldwide and three bishops resigning last week alone, it is clear the issue is more than a passing storm or a problem of papal communications.

Instead, the church is undergoing nothing less than an epochal shift: It pits those who hold fast to a more traditional idea of protecting bishops and priests above all against those who call for more openness and accountability. The battle lines are drawn between the church and society at large, which clearly clamors for accountability, and also inside the church itself.

Uncomfortably, the crisis also pits the moral legacies of two popes against each other: the towering and modernizing John Paul II, who nonetheless did little about sexual abuse; and his successor, Benedict XVI, who in recent years, at least, has taken the issue of pedophile priests more seriously.

He has had little choice, given the depth of the scandal and the anger it has unleashed. But when supporters defend Benedict, they are implicitly condemning John Paul and how an entire generation of bishops and the Vatican hierarchy acted in response to criminal behavior.

“The church realizes that it doesn’t have a way out, at least not until it confronts the entirety of its problems,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the liberal Catholic John XXIII Foundation for Religious Science in Bologna, Italy.

This latest eruption of the scandal, nearly a decade after the costly turmoil in the American church, may just be beginning. Last week, a bishop in Ireland resigned, acknowledging he had covered up abuse, while one in Germany and one in Belgium also stepped down, admitting that they themselves had abused children. Other resignations are expected in Ireland after two government reports documented decades of widespread abuse and a cover-up in church-run schools for the poor.

The question, Mr. Melloni said, is whether the Vatican will hew to old explanations that pedophilia is the byproduct of a sexual revolution it had always fought, or whether it will confront the failures in church leadership that allowed sexual abuses to go unpunished…..

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The biggest problem between Pakistan and India currently is the absence of trust. Anything that addresses this trust deficit is, therefore, helpful. For this reason, I warmly welcome the initiative by The Times of India Group and the Jang Group of Pakistan to initiate the project ‘Aman Ki Asha’. Media can help remove suspicions about each other.

This is all the more important because the existing suspicions and distrust about each other have been further exacerbated by irresponsible and distorted stories, carried by sections of the media in both the countries, in the first instance.

Some people in both countries may well say that, after all, both Pakistan and India are important countries and could go their own way. But it was for a good reason that former Prime Minister Vajpayee said, “You can change history but not geography” during a debate in the Lok Sabha. PM Manmohan Singh echoed similar sentiments in the Lok Sabha, where he said, “As neighbours, it is our obligation to keep our channels open. Unless we want to go to war with Pakistan, dialogue is the only way forward”. I was encouraged to note during the recent ‘Aman Ki Asha’ session in Lahore that some Indian participants said India felt the need to resolve the issue of Jammu & Kashmir inter alia for two reasons. First, India being a democracy could not resort to force in J&K for an indefinite period, and second, that India could achieve its real potential and play a major role on the world stage only after resolving its disputes with Pakistan.

As a lifelong politician, who has been elected a member of parliament from a constituency in central Punjab on the Indian border, and as a former foreign minister, I can say with confidence that peace with India is not only in the national interest of Pakistan but can also be sold to the people of Pakistan, provided it is peace with honour. History teaches us that’s the only lasting peace. India is a big country and may have extra-regional ambitions. As far as Pakistan is concerned, our very doctrine is one of minimum credible deterrence aimed at protecting Pakistan’s national security…..

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