India concede late goal, draw with Pak
Courts will now be required to call for the mental health report of an accused and assess their conduct in jail before sentencing anyone to death, according to a new set of guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in a judgment last week. Dealing with an appeal filed by three death row convicts from Madhya Pradesh who entered a house to steal in
June 2011 and ended up brutally murdering three women, a three-judge SC bench, looking into their good conduct in jail and strong inclination to reform, replaced the concurrent verdicts of death sentence by the trial court and the MP high court with life term for a minimum term of 25 years. The judgment, pronounced on Friday, provided seven factors to be analysed — circumstances around which crime was committed, age of the accused, their mental state at time of crime, the possibility of reform, and whether accused would be a continuing threat to society.
Defending champions India conceded a late goal to allow arch-rivals Pakistan walk away with a 1-1 draw in their opening Pool A match of the Asia Cup men’s hockey tournament in Jakarta on Monday. India took the lead in the ninth minute through Karthi Selvam, who scored his first international goal after his flick following a penalty corner breached Pakistan’s goal after getting a deflection off the stick of defender Muhammad Abdullah. Though keeping up the pressure, India could not capitalise, and in the 59th minute, a lapse in concentration resulted in a penalty corner for Pakistan, which was converted by Abdul Rana, who pushed in from a rebound after Mubashar Ali’s flick was saved at the goal line by Yashdeep Siwach. India will next play Japan on Tuesday.
Extreme heat has held large parts of South Asia in its grip since the beginning of March, removing spring from the seasonal calendar. March was the hottest in India since records began to be kept 122 years ago, with temperatures consistently 3°C-8°C above average, breaking many records in several parts of the country, writes Friederike Otto of Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London. The heat was combined with below-average rainfall, leading to India’s wheat-growing regions losing much of their harvest. This isn’t just a hot summer in South Asia. It affects the whole world, more and more often, in areas where temperatures of almost 50°C were unthinkable until a few years ago and considered statistically extremely improbable . That heat records are being broken is nothing new. We’ve known for a long time that this would happen in a warming world — we’ve seen it, we’re seeing it now and it will continue until we stop burning fossil fuels.