Indian Legal Bottleneck, DERIVATIVE MARKET REFORM Pt I & II, Beijing broods over its arc of anxiety,Books of the decade: Your best books of 2005,

Indian Legal Bottleneck: Kasab's trial is into its eighth month. But in India's notoriously slow legal system, this is fast. A staggering backlog of civil and criminal cases clog India's courts. According to figures released by the Indian Supreme Court last year, India has a backlog of 29.2 million cases across hundreds of subordinate state-level courts, 21 high courts and the Supreme Court. Out of this number, over 25.4 million cases are pending in subordinate courts, 3.7 million in various high courts while the Supreme Court has 45,887 cases awaiting justice. According to a report by the Law Commission of India, India's population-to-judge ratio is one of the lowest in the world. While the United States and Britain have about 150 judges for every million of its population, India has only 10 judges for the same number.

Beijing broods over its arc of anxiety By Peter Lee However, active mischief by India inside Afghanistan is not needed to destabilize Pakistan. Merely prolonging the Western military effort in Afghanistan sustains the disastrously unfavorable configuration of forces destabilizing Pakistan, and is a geopolitical victory for India.
It was probably no coincidence that at the same time the Dalai Lama paid a high-profile visit to Tawang, one of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader's favorite monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh, China found it convenient to invite influential Kashmir separatist Mirwaiz Umar Farooq - also a religious leader affiliated with the largest mosque in Kashmir - to visit Beijing on a trip.

Books of the decade: Your best books of 2005

Robert Fisk: "They shoot Russians," the young paratrooper told me. It was cold. We had come across his unit, the Soviet 105th Airborne Division, near Charikar, north of Kabul, and he was holding out a bandaged hand. Blood seeped through, staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was just a teenager with fair hair and blue eyes. Beside us a Soviet transport lorry, its rear section blown to pieces by a mine � yes, an "improvised explosive device", though we didn't call it that yet � lay upended in a ditch. In pain, the young man raised his hand to the mountain-tops where a Soviet helicopter was circling. Could I ever have imagined that Messers Bush and Blair would have landed us in the same sepulchre of armies almost three decades later? Or that a young black American president would do exactly what the Russians did all those years ago?

In a very strong year, my choices would include Murakami and Mantel along with Doctorow and Didion. How about you?

Johann Hari: How I wish that the global warming deniers were right - Imagine you are about to get on a plane with your family. A huge group of qualified airline mechanics approach you on the tarmac and explain they've studied the engine for many years and they're sure it will crash if you get on board. They show you their previous predictions of plane crashes, which have overwhelmingly been proven right. Then a group of vets, journalists, and plumbers tell they have looked at the diagrams and it's perfectly obvious to them the plane is safe and that airplane mechanics � all of them, everywhere � are scamming you. Would you get on the plane? That is our choice at Copenhagen.



DERIVATIVE MARKET REFORM, Part 2
The courageous Brooksley Born
By Henry CK Liu
This article concludes a two-part series.
Part 1: The folly of deregulation