Dalit man beaten to death in Gujarat, 5 held

New Delhi, May 23: India will try to restart a good percentage of international passenger flights before August, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Saturday, three days after announcing resumption of domestic flights from May 25.

All scheduled commercial passenger flights have been suspended in India since March 25 when the Modi government imposed a lockdown to contain the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"I am fully hopeful that before August or September, we will try to start a good percentage of international civil aviation operations, if not complete international operations," Puri said during a Facebook live session.

"I can't put a date on it (restarting international flights). But if somebody says can it be done by August or September, my response is why not earlier depending on what is the situation," he said.

New Delhi, Feb 5: Delhi High Court on Wednesday stated that that death warrant of all convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case should be executed together.

The Delhi prison rules do not state whether when the mercy petition of one convict is pending, the execution of the other convicts can take place and from the trial court to Supreme Court all convicts have been held by a common order and a common judgment, Justice Suresh Kumar Kait observed while passing the order.

High Court dismissed the Central government and Tihar Jail authorities plea challenging the Patiala House court's order, which stayed the execution of the four convicts in the case. It also observed that the convicts indulged in a heinous offence of a bone-chilling rape and murder of a girl and that criminal appeals by all convicts were dismissed by the courts.

Moreover, the court observed that the review petitions were filed after long wait and convicts are taking shelter of Article 21 which is available to them till their last breath.

A single-judge bench of Justice Suresh Kumar Kait had on Sunday kept the order reserved in the matter after special hearing of two days.

Earlier, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing on behalf of the Centre, alleged that the convicts were deliberately delaying the execution, adding that any delay in death sentence will have a dehumanising effect on the convicts.

A Delhi court last week stayed till further orders the execution of the four convicts -- Akshay Thakur, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, and Vinay Sharma -- which was earlier scheduled to take place on February 1.

The case pertains to the gang-rape and brutal murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by six people, including a juvenile, in Delhi. The woman had died at a Singapore hospital a few days later.

One of the five adults accused, Ram Singh, had allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail during the trial of the case.

Feb 28: The best economic tonic for the coronavirus shock is to contain its spread and worry about stimulus later, said Raghuram Rajan, former head of the Reserve Bank of India.

There’s little central banks can do, and while more government spending would help, the priority should be on convincing companies and households that the virus is under control, he said.

“People want to have a sense that there is a limit to the spread of this virus perhaps because of containment measures or because there is hope that some kind of viral solution can be found,” Rajan told Bloomberg Television’s Haidi Stroud Watts and Shery Ahn.

“At this point I would say the best thing that governments can do is to really fight the epidemic rather than worry about stimulus measures that comes later,” said Rajan, who is currently a professor at the Chicago Booth School of Business.

The spread of coronavirus is pushing the world economy toward its worst performance since the financial crisis more than a decade ago.

Bank of America Corp. economists warned clients Thursday that they now expect 2.8% global growth this year, the weakest since 2009.

“We have moved from extreme confidence in markets to extreme panic, all in the space of one week,” said Rajan, who previously was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

The virus outbreak will force companies to rethink supply chains and overseas production facilities, he said.

“I think we will see a lot of rethinking on this, coming on the back of the trade disruption, now we have this,” Rajan said. “Globalization in production is going to be hit quite badly.”