NEW DELHI: CJI Surya Kant has devised four categories of cases to prioritise listing and hearing of petitions filed by socially, physically, and financially disadvantaged people. The new categories of cases relate to those filed by disabled people and acid attack survivors, by senior citizens above 80 years, persons who are below poverty line and those who have approached the court through legal aid services that provide free advocate assistance to poor litigants. The new categorisation was needed as their cases used to get lost in the crowd of 800-odd cases that get listed on Mondays and Fridays, the two days in a week when 16 benches of SC entertain fresh petitions and determine whether these require longer hearing. A circular by the SC registry said, “Members of the Bar, parties-in-person and all stakeholders are required to invariably mention the relevant head… under which the matter actually falls, in all the fresh petitions to be filed… and submit an appropriate application/letter along with the documentary proof issued by an appropriate govt authority in this regard.”SC handled 75k cases in 2025, unmatched by any top courtFurther, all concerned are also requested to provide the said details in pending matters/cases to enable the registry to appropriately update the matter under the respective head. This will enable the registry to prioritise listing of such cases,” it said. The humongous volume of cases handled by the highest court of the country is unmatched by any country’s Supreme Court, by a huge margin. In 2025, as many as 75,280 cases were filed in SC – 51,357 civil and 23,923 criminal. It decided 65,403 (87% of the total filing), 42,793 civil and 22,610 criminal. In contrast, though thousands of cases are filed every year in US Supreme Court, it accepts only 70-80 cases for arguments. Till Dec 29, UK Supreme Court had received little over 200 cases and gave judgments in around 50 cases. Their Indian counterpart gave 1,400 lengthy judgments and thousands of orders to dispose of cases. SC, which saw three CJIs in 2025 in Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai and Surya Kant, will not see a new CJI till Feb 2027, when Justice Kant retires. In 2027, SC will see a record four CJIs – Justices Surya Kant, Vikram Nath (from Feb to Sep), BV Nagarathna (for 37 days) and PS Narasimha.

NEW DELHI: A Kolkata-based businessman weaved a web of 60 shell companies with drivers, house-keeping staff, office boys, junior staff and relatives as directors and created a fictitious turnover of thousands of crores in iron & steel manufacturing, all on paper with no real business activity involved, and swindled a consortium of govt banks of more than Rs 6,200 crore, with the head of one of the lead banks playing accessory. The scam was scripted by Sanjay Sureka, who created dozens of shell entities and with the help of S K Goel, then CMD of Uco Bank, managed to get loans of Rs 6,200 crore. “Against loans of over Rs 6,200 crore, the company’s liquidation value barely reached Rs 600 crore, and assets sold so far have realised only Rs 434 crore,” ED has said in its investigation report. The entire operation was unearthed with Goel’s arrest by ED on May 16 at his residence in New Delhi. The agency later identified properties worth over Rs 106 crore associated with family members and aides and attached them. Sureka and his associates were arrested in Dec 2024, as the agency started probing money laundering based on a CBI FIR against them. According to an ED investigation report, at the centre of this scam was Concast Steel & Power Ltd (CSPL) – once a flagship iron & steel group with plants across West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh – which was taken over by Sureka in 2008. Sureka conjured up the shell entities and with the help of Goel, who served as CMD of Uco Bank between 2007-2010, managed to get a total of Rs 6,200 crore in loans without interest and penalty. This money was laundered by the accused and quid pro quo to Goel was transferred in the name of shell companies that purchased properties on the bank CMD’s behalf with the ownership of these firms later being transferred to Goel’s family members. “It is a case study in how an entire financial ecosystem can be manipulated through fake turnover, circular transactions and system-wide blind spots, ultimately leaving public sector banks poorer by more than Rs 6,210.7 crore, excluding interest,” a senior official said. The official further said 60 shell companies sprang up under the directorship of drivers, office boys and junior staff to help Sureka justify massive flows of funds. ED’s investigation unearthed fake sales, purchases and transport billings where CSPL “pretended to buy and sell iron and steel products” with associated entities, backed by forged invoices, ledger entries, and transport documents. “Fake transportation receipts were prepared to show trucks carrying goods between factories and shell companies, even though no truck ever moved, no goods were loaded, and no delivery was made. Yet on paper, CSPL looked like a bustling, high-volume operation with continuous production and sales,” a source said. The probe further revealed that neither sale proceeds nor payments for purchases were made through banks, 99% of the transactions were merely book entries. Yet, during the entire operation lasting several years, it did not raise any alarm bells in the banks, which continued lending. “This meant Concast was essentially selling to itself and then realising these payments through accounting fiction. By 2017, the deception hit its peak – 99% of all sales to these entities were settled through book adjustments, not a single real rupee flowed in through the banking system,” sources said. Purchases tell the same story. Over 50% of all raw material sourcing came from the same web of related-party entities. And just like sales, almost 90% of payments to these “suppliers” were made through internal adjustments – no real cash outflow, no genuine material movement, just rotating entries to manufacture expenses, inflate working capital needs, and justify massive fund withdrawals, the probe report said.

SRINAGAR: The J&K high court set aside Wednesday the conviction of an elderly woman in a 1979 murder case from Uri near the LoC in Baramulla district of north Kashmir, citing 46 years of prolonged proceedings and her age-related infirmities.A single-judge bench of Justice Sanjay Parihar ruled that the sentence of Shameema Begam should be treated as already undergone, saying no useful purpose would be served by maintaining a substantive jail term after decades of litigation. The court ordered closure of the case, while saying that “the offence was committed in a heat of passion without premeditation.”The killing dates back to July 10, 1979, when Begam of Bijhama village struck her mother-in-law with an axe during a domestic quarrel. The older woman had intervened in an argument when Begam was repeatedly asked to irrigate maize fields and later died of head wounds four days later.Begam was arrested on July 21, 1979, and released on bail on Oct 25 that year. Police registered an FIR at Bijhama police station under sections 326 and 324 of Ranbir Penal Code, the criminal law then in force in J&K under Dogra-era statutes. After the victim died, the charge was converted to murder under section 302 RPC.The trial dragged on for three decades. On July 16, 2009, a trial court convicted Begam under section 304 RPC, holding that the act was culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and sentenced her to five years of rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs 2,000. She was arrested after conviction but released on bail within days — on July 28, 2009.Begam appealed the verdict. The appeal remained pending for more than 16 years before coming up for final hearing. Her lawyer Nida Nazir said extraordinary delay in both trial and appeal violated Begam’s right to a speedy trial and warranted a sympathetic approach.HC called the case “a testimony to the systemic delay in the disposal of criminal cases”. While delay cannot ordinarily benefit a convict, the court said, it cannot ignore the reality of accused people remaining trapped in the criminal justice system for decades. “The appeal is accordingly disposed of,” the court said, bringing an end to one of Kashmir’s longest-running criminal cases.

AI generated image for representation

This year, or in February 2025 to be precise, Andrej Karpathy, the former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI, gave the technology world a new word — Vibe Coding. Karpathy came up with the word to represent how AI can let some programmers “forget that the code even exists” and “give in to the vibes” while making a computer program. The word became an overnight buzzword in Silicon Valley. And as the year ended, UK’s Collins Dictionary picked it up as the word of the year. It was one of 10 words on a shortlist to reflect the mood, language and preoccupations of 2025.As to how Andrej Karpathy described the word, here’s the definition Karpathy shared on Twitter, “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.”

Will Vibe Coding take away tech jobs

Is Vibe Coding and advanced capabilities of AI just the nail in the coffin when it comes to the traditional views of computer programming and software development skills? The debate is ongoing, with strong voices on both sides. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC earlier this year that app developers can now offload or automate more repetitive tasks, and they can generate new code using Large Language Models (LLMs). The ability for AI to subsidize an otherwise heavy workload has allowed these companies to build with fewer people.” Tan said. “That sounds a little scary, but on the other hand, what that means for founders is that you don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers. You know, maybe it’s that engineer who couldn’t get a job at Meta or Google, who actually can build a standalone business making 10 or 100 million dollars a year with 10 people,” Tan says. “Like that’s such a powerful moment in software.” Tan tweeted another not-so-happy stat for engineers: 25% of the current crop of Y Combinator startups used LLMs (AI large language models) to write 95% of their lines of code.Cursor CEO Michael Truell recently warned that Vibe coding builds ‘shaky foundations’ and eventually ‘things start to crumble’. Truell reportedly likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring. This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned, as per a report in Fortune. “If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said.

How Collins Dictionary defines Vibe Coding

Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said, “The selection of ‘vibe coding’ as Collins’ Word of the Year perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.” Collins’ definition of Vibe Coding states, “vibe coding” is “the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code.” Or, as a blog post on the dictionary’s website explains: “Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.”

Ukraine marks its fourth year New Year since Russia’s offensive. Wishing peace at the commencement of 2026, Ukrainians express the “hell” their life has become due to attacks and power cuts.Strikes on energy grids in Ukraine intensified during the winter of 2025, leaving over 2,600 residences without power in the sub-zero temperatures in the Kyiv region alone. AFP reported in the Kyiv suburb of Vyshhorod, a four-day blackout ended just in time before the new year. The residents shared how they wanted the war to end “as soon as possible.”“What else can we wish for? At a time like this, nothing else comes to mind,” said Kostiantyn Biden, a local ceiling fitter. He shares that his building was left without power and water during the blackout.Strikes from Russia have pounded Ukraine almost daily. Drones and missile attacks have been falling on Russia’s neighbouring country since the full-scale invasion in February 2022.A local beauty salon staff in Vyshhorod shared the “hell” she is going through with her staff working in a shelter amid the power outages. Daria Lushchyk, the manager at the salon, shares that the clients are still coming in regardless of the unstable conditions.“Everyone has somehow adapted and understands that stopping is absolutely not an option,” she said. “Nothing can stop our Ukrainian girls from coming in and getting themselves glam,” she added, sharing the great spirit she had witnessed.She further goes on to share her wish for the New Year 2026, “Of course, peace,” she said, adding she does not find it wise to say wishes out loud, “or they might not come true.”Pensioner Neonila said Ukrainians had learned to live with recurring power outages, relying on candlelight and mobile phone flashlights. Yet, she admitted the New Year brought her little sense of celebration.“We’ll mark it quietly at home, without any extravagance,” she said.In Vyshgorod, authorities established so-called “resilience centres” during the blackout, allowing residents to charge their phones and access basic services.The town has also endured heavy bombardment. Longtime resident Ivan Oleksiiovych described the attacks to AFP as senseless, calling them “stupid.”Neonila said she was reluctant to make plans for 2026. She had few wishes for next year.“That there be light,” she said. “Everything else will follow.”Russia, however, has denied targeting civilians. It has called its invasion a “special military operation” aimed at preventing the expansion of NATO. Kyiv and its allies have called the war aim a lie.