India’s Cabinet accepted most of the recommendations of a commission for toughening laws for crimes against women, including increasing the penalty for rape.
The panel was set up in response to the fatal gang rape in December last year of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi.
The Cabinet recommended on Friday that Indian President Pranab Mukherjee issue an ordinance to turn the proposals into law, Minister of Law Ashwini Kumar said.
The commission recommended an increase in the penalty for rape to 20 years in prison and suggested life terms for gang rape.
Kumar did not give details.
However, the Press Trust of India news agency said the Cabinet went beyond the panel’s recommendations by providing for death sentences in cases where a rape leads to death of the victim or leaves them in a “persistent vegetative state.”
The Cabinet also recommended including crimes like stalking, cyberstalking and voyeurism, and imposing stiff punishments for such crimes.
“We believe that this is a progressive piece of legislation and is consistent with felt sensitivities of the nation in the aftermath of an outrageous gang-rape in New Delhi,” Kumar said.
Police say the young woman and a male friend were attacked after boarding the bus on Dec. 16 last year. The attackers beat the man and raped the woman, inflicting massive internal injuries with a metal bar, police said.
The victims were dumped on the roadside, and the woman died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.