India's Cabinet has passed an executive order to make the rape of a girl under 12 punishable by the death penalty as national outrage grows over sexual violence in the country.

The order -- known as an ordinance -- was approved Saturday at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to India's Ministry of Women and Child Development.
The change in the law will only become permanent once it is approved by India's Parliament, which is currently in recess. It goes into effect once it's signed by the President, considered a formality, but it will lapse after six months if Parliament doesn't ratify it.

I CAN’T remember how many times I was sectioned,” says Hannah MacDonald, a former nurse. She recalls much of the first time, though. During therapy in 2007 she mentioned that she had self-harmed and had suicidal thoughts. The next morning, on arriving at work, she was taken to a windowless room in the bowels of a psychiatric hospital in London. There, a doctor asked probing questions about her mental health. Soon more unknown faces entered the room to observe her. She began to feel overwhelmed and her speech slowed. Then she was told she had been detained under section two of the Mental Health Act. After that, Ms MacDonald recalls only a few things, including being told that if she refused medication, she would be injected. It took eight months for her to be released.

Ms MacDonald is part of a growing cohort. The number of detentions under the Mental Health Act in England rose from 43,463 in 2009 to 63,622 in 2016. The process requires two doctors and one approved mental-health professional, like a social worker or nurse, to agree that a patient needs hospital treatment for a mental-health disorder, and that they may pose a danger to themself or others.

Experts admit it is impossible to know whether the increase is justified or not. But many are alarmed by its sheer speed. Some also worry that those with only minor conditions are being swept up in the rise.

What is behind it? One theory blames the underfunding of early-intervention services. These were set up by hospital trusts in the early 2000s, after which the number of detentions began slowly to fall. But since 2011 mental-health spending in Britain has fallen by about 1% in real terms, while greater public awareness of mental-health issues has stoked demand for services. As a result, mental-health teams are stretched. Someone with psychosis, for instance, should receive treatment in two weeks but may wait up to six months, says Will Johnstone of Rethink Mental Illness, a charity. In that time their condition may deteriorate, leading them to be sectioned.

Another factor is a long-term drop in the number of beds for psychiatric patients. A shift away from hospital treatment to care in the community saw the number fall from about 155,000 in 1954 to around 20,000 today. Most have welcomed the change. But a lack of beds raises the pressure to discharge patients early, meaning some need to be sectioned again. A survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2014 found that about a fifth of trainee psychiatrists had sectioned patients just to secure them a bed and care.

Doctors have also become more risk-averse, says Sir Simon Wessely, professor of psychiatry at King’s College, London, and the chairman of an official review into sectioning set up last year. In 2014 a Supreme Court judgment broadened the definition of unlawful deprivation of liberty. One effect is that some elderly folk with dementia, who had previously been kept in hospital with a bit of informal persuasion by doctors and relatives, are now being sectioned in order to avoid accusations of unlawful detention. A recent report by the Care Quality Commission, a watchdog, revealed that in some wards for elderly people, every patient had been sectioned.

Doctors also seem to be more nervous than before about suicide. In 2009 the National Health Service drew up a list of eight “never events”, errors so grave they should be expected never to happen, and which trigger an internal investigation if they do. It includes patients using curtain or shower rails to commit suicide in mental-health units. In January Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, launched a “zero-suicide target” in hospitals. Such a focus may encourage doctors to increase the supervision of their patients by sectioning them sooner and for longer, rather than risking a death.

That risk-aversion may also harm the recovery of those detained, argues Ms MacDonald. She eventually recovered in a hospital which let her take up pastimes like embroidery and walking in the garden. Such activities calmed her down when she felt depressed. Yet stricter infirmaries did not allow them, for fear of self-harm.

The rise in sectioning has disproportionately affected ethnic minorities. Black people are four times more likely to be sectioned than whites. This long-standing pattern is partly explained by black Britons’ lower incomes, which are linked to poor mental health. But it is also down to discrimination and a lack of black people in senior roles in mental-health services, says Patrick Vernon of Black Thrive, a charity.

Sir Simon’s review will report its initial findings in the next few weeks and make proposals later in the year. Some will be quick fixes, but mental-health legislation can take decades to change because it is so complex, he warns. One hurdle is legal, since the rules on sectioning are tied to other laws, such as the Mental Capacity Act. Another is ethical, because of the need to balance individuals’ right to liberty against the state’s duty to protect them and others. And a third is scientific, as mental illness has many causes, from the genetic to the economic. The rise in sectioning may have been rapid, but anyone hoping for an overhaul of the system is in for a long wait.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is planning to introduce a bill on Friday that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level

Melina Roberge will remain behind bars until at least 2021 for role in cruise ship drug trafficking

PARENTS these days spend a lot more time with their offspring, or at least middle-class parents do. One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59.


At the same time a gap has opened between working-class and middle-class parents. In 1965 mothers with and without a university education spent about the same amount of time on child care. By 2012 the more educated ones were spending half an hour more per day. The exception is France, where the stereotype of a bourgeois couple sipping wine and ignoring their remarkably well-behaved progeny appears to be accurate.

AMID Iraqi calls to reinforce the rule of law and strengthen Iraqi state institutions, the Ministry of Justice announced March 28 a new initiative for “arbitration” among tribes, allowing a team of tribal elders to intervene as arbitrators in resolving all possible disputes and conflicts between Iraqi tribes.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Justice, this team of 47 tribal leaders will be called “Al-Awaref,” selected by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior in virtue of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Justice and to be charged with several tasks, most notably reducing the expansion of tribal conflicts and focusing on “bringing about community peace” in Iraqi provinces.

The 47 arbitrators will work voluntarily and receive no salaries from the Iraqi state. In addition to undergoing a background check by the Ministry of the Interior, their names were presented to tribal leaders for approval.

The Ministry of Justice statement noted that the ministry “has adopted a team of well-known tribal arbitrators to resolve disputes,” describing them as “a safety valve for the community, which will have a major role in strengthening security and establishing community peace in all provinces of the country.”

LATIN America boasts just 8% of the world’s population, but it accounts for 38% of its murders. The number of criminal killings in the region came to around 140,000 people last year, more than have been lost in wars around the world in almost all of the years this century. And the crime is becoming ever more common.

Yet the continent also has some of the biggest improvers. In many Colombian cities murder used to be the leading cause of death. The rate in Cali in 1994 was 124 per 100,000, four times worse than New York at its most lethal. The mayor was a surgeon who realised that murder was like a disease. Following an approach pioneered in New York and copied across the rich world, he set up “violence observatories” to study precisely how people, places and behaviour led to killings. They found that, even amid a raging drugs war, most murders resulted from drunken brawls. Restrictions on alcohol and guns helped cut murders by 35%. Other Colombian cities tweaked Cali’s evidence-based policing to suit their own needs—Medellín, for example, targeted drug cartels. Police and judicial reform, and aid from the United States, were crucial, too. In 2017 Colombia’s murder rate was 24 per 100,000, the lowest for 42 years.

That is still high, and there are more problems to come. The demobilisation of the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) after decades of guerrilla war has created local power vacuums that could be filled by organised crime, especially if the government does not create opportunities for ex-combatants, coca farmers and young people. “Colombia is not approaching heaven,” says María Victoria Llorente of the Ideas for Peace Foundation. “We’re barely leaving hell, and if we aren’t careful, we’ll stay in limbo.”

A man named Eddie threads through the mid-afternoon crowd in Cambridge, Mass. He's headed for a sandwich shop, the first stop on a tour of public bathrooms.

"I know all the bathrooms that I can and can't get high in," says Eddie, 39, pausing in front of the shop's plate glass windows, through which we can see a bathroom door.

Eddie, whose last name we're not including because he uses illegal drugs, knows which restrooms along busy Massachusetts Avenue he can enter, at what hours and for how long. Several restaurants, offices and a social service agency in this neighborhood have closed their restrooms in recent months, but not this sandwich shop.

"With these bathrooms here, you don't need a key. If it's vacant you go in. And then the staff just leaves you alone," Eddie says. "I know so many people who get high here."

At the fast food place right across the street, it's much harder to get in and out.

"You don't need a key, but they have a security guard that sits at the little table by the door, directly in front of the bathroom," Eddie says. Some guards require a receipt for admission to the bathroom, he says, but you can always grab one from the trash.

A chain restaurant a few stores down has installed bathroom door locks opened by a code that you get at the counter. But Eddie and his friends just wait by the door until a customer enters the restroom, then grab the door and enter as the customer leaves.

"For every 10 steps they use to safeguard against us doing something, we're going to find 15 more to get over on their 10. That's just how it is. I'm not saying that's right, that's just how it is," Eddie says.

Eddie is homeless and works at a restaurant. Public bathrooms are one of the few places where he can find privacy to inject heroin. He says he doesn't use the drug often these days. Eddie is on methadone, which curbs his craving for heroin, so he only uses the drug occasionally to be social with friends.

He understands why restaurant owners are unnerved.

"These businesses, primarily, are like family businesses; middle class people coming in to grab a burger or a cup of coffee. They don't expect to find somebody dead," Eddie says. "I get it."

Managing public bathrooms is "a tricky thing"

Many businesses don't know what to do. Some have installed low lighting — blue light, in particular — to make it difficult for people who use injected drugs to find a vein.

The bathrooms at 1369 Coffee House in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass., are open for customers who request the key code from staff at the counter. The owner, Joshua Gerber, has done some remodeling to make the bathrooms safer. There's a metal box in the wall next to his toilet for needles and other things that clog pipes. And Gerber removed the dropped ceilings in his bathrooms after noticing things tucked above the tiles.

(Reuters) – In China, a platform for risqué jokes is no laughing matter.tent

Toutiao, a hugely popular news and online content portal that is luring investors, was forced to pull its joke sharing “Neihan Duanzi” app, literally meaning “implied jokes”, after a watchdog said it included “vulgar and improper content”.

The move comes amid a broader clamp-down targeting online content from livestreams and blogs to mobile gaming, as the country’s leaders look to tighten their grip over a huge and diverse cultural scene online popular with China’s youth.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull asserted the right of the Australian navy to travel the South China Sea, after local media reported three Australian warships were challenged by the Chinese navy earlier this month.

In the last two decades, Norway has made a series of changes to lower their recidivism rate --  the rate people convicted of crimes re-offend. These changes include making life in prison look a lot more like normal life.

Authorities estimate that 13,335 people were sent to the gas chambers during his time at the death camp.

IN 1954 an Ohio jury was told it must acquit Sam Sheppard of murdering his wife if the jurors had a “reasonable doubt” that he had done so. The judge then defined “reasonable doubt”:

It is not a mere possible doubt, because everything relating to human affairs or depending upon moral evidence is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of the jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction to a moral certainty of the truth of the charge.

Sheppard was convicted. Larry Solan of Brooklyn Law School reckons that this and other baffling instructions misled the jury into thinking that the burden of proof was on Sheppard to prove himself innocent, not on the state to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In a second trial, in 1966, he was found not guilty and freed.

A jury is a buffer between defendants and the might of the state, and a jury trial is guaranteed in America’s bill of rights. But there is reason to worry that juries often do not understand what they are told to do to fulfil this role. Jurors are not (usually) lawyers, which is the point. They are the defendant’s peers. But their instructions are written by lawyers, who areoften so immersed in their professional argot that they do not realise how impenetrable it can be to outsiders.

Take this sentence from Massachusetts’s civil-jury instructions: “A preponderance of the evidence is such evidence which, when considered and compared with any opposed to it, has more convincing force and produces in your minds a belief that what is sought to be proved is more probably true than not true.” The sentence is not only long; the bigger problem is that it has four clauses, embedded within one another. This kind of prose is hard to process, especially for non-native speakers, even more so when it is spoken rather than written down.

Another problem is the passive voice. Though the passive has some applications, it is overused in formal contexts. Like convoluted clauses, passive jury instructions can be hard to follow. Research has shown that when people hear sentences such as “the woman was visited by the man”, and are quickly prompted to identify who was the “do-er” and who “acted upon”, their reaction time and accuracy are considerably worse than when hearing the active-voice equivalent.

A final problem is legalese. Lawyers love words such as “notwithstanding” and “inference”, but studies suggest as many as half of jurors think “preponderance” has something to do with pondering. Even plain words like “burden” have specialised meanings in court.

Janet Randall, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University, has found that rendering these instructions in plain English, stripping out passives and legalese especially, makes them much easier to interpret. Providing a written version brought an even bigger benefit. She first recorded modest results when testing psychologists’ favourite lab rats—their students. But these are people who did well on English tests to get into university. When she recruited respondents online, who looked more like the actual jury pool overall, the good effects of the plain-English instructions shot up.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on ambiguous jury instructions, but has not yet struck down those that are merely hard to comprehend. Some American states have adopted simplified language, and some provide each juror with written instructions. But some still have not. A justifiable reason is that it can be difficult to render legalese accurately into terms that sound like conversational English. Less defensible reasons are mere inertia or, even worse, the belief on the part of a few judges that cumbersome formal language is needed to give jurors a sense of the majesty of the law.

Jurors will not often want to admit they don’t understand. They are eager to end the trials and get back to their lives, and lawyers and judges in crowded court systems want them to get on with it, too. But bafflement should worry anyone who may face a jury, particularly in a country where the state can execute a defendant (see article). As long as that is the law in America, every easy reform that makes the system work better should be seized with urgency. Cleaning up the language of courtrooms is an obvious place to start.

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First a mayor, then a man accused of stealing, were humiliated and punished publicly in two different towns in the northeast of Bolivia. Both of them had one leg put into stocks, a punishment that some deemed humiliating and others found justified. In a country where indigenous justice is recognised by law, was this punishment legal?

Dismissive of hyperbole, the former secretary of state is still nervy about Donald Trump

Fascism: A Warning. By Madeleine Albright. Harper Collins; 254 pages; $27.99 and £16.99.

WITHIN each human heart lies an inexhaustible yearning for liberty, “or so we democrats like to believe”, writes Madeleine Albright near the end of “Fascism: A Warning”, a book on how nations descend into tyranny. In reality, that desire often competes with another: the urge to be told what to do. When people are fearful, angry or confused, observes Mrs Albright, a former secretary of state, they are tempted to give away freedoms, or the freedom of others, to leaders promising order. In uncertain times many no longer want to be asked what they think: “We want to be told where to march.”....

She describes a graduate seminar with Georgetown students in her sitting room, “lasagne-leaking paper plates on their laps” as she challenges them to define fascism. She reminds the class that fascism wears different ideological guises, sometimes calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat or higher pensions for the old, at others seizing power in the name of a race, a religion or national rebirth. In a useful passage, she defines a fascist as someone who claims to speak for a nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use all means, including violence: “A fascist will likely be a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a fascist.” One litmus test involves who is trusted with guns. Many kings or dictators fear the masses, and create corps of bodyguards to shield them, she notes. Fascists seek to have the mob on their side.

Mrs Albright sees only one true fascist regime today, in North Korea, with its ultra-nationalism and murderous contempt for human rights. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is not a full-blown fascist, she finds, because he has not yet felt the need.

Bookshops are full of expert guides to spotting a country’s slide into autocracy. Bearing names like “How Democracies Die” or “Trumpocracy”, they generally focus on the man in the White House. This book is broader; Mrs Albright says she first planned it as a primer for defending democracies worldwide, when she thought Hillary Clinton would win. Still, in historical chapters that a college might call Fascism 101, she has professorial fun describing despotic tactics with modern-day echoes, noting for instance that Benito Mussolini promised to “drain the swamp” by sacking Italian civil servants. Journalists were pointed out at his rallies so that his fans could yell at them. Only in periods of relative tranquillity are citizens “patient” enough for debate and deliberation, she writes, or to listen to experts.

The man, who is Tibetan and worked for the pro-Tibetan "Voice of Tibet" newspaper, is accused of supplying the Chinese government with information on where exiled Tibetans live, their family relationships, and their travel plans.

The man carried out his suspected espionage on "certain people of importance to the Chinese regime" Swedish prosecutors said, primarily through attending political meetings of the Tibetan diaspora in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.

His purpose was to "pass this information to representatives of the Chinese state".

Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told Swedish broadcaster SVT that he man had been in contact with Chinese officials in Poland and Finland, and was paid 50,000 kronor ($6,000) on at least one occasion.

Ljungqvist said the crime was serious because the man was deeply embedded in the Tibetan community and "could have caused or still cause a large number of people serious harm".

READ ALSO: Man suspected of spying on Tibetans in Sweden for China

Jamyang Choedon, who chairs the Tibetan Community in Sweden organisation said the decision to charge the man was a breakthrough.

"It is clear that there are spies who are sent by China to Tibetan communities, but this is the first time it’s been officially investigated," she told The Local.

"It will be interesting for us to know if it's really true or not. We've heard that it's happening, but now we might have evidence."

Andrew Namiki Roberts this week filed suit against Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard and state Attorney General Russell Suzuki seeking to overturn the state’s strict laws concerning stun guns and tasers. The devices are illegal to possess or sell under most circumstances, with exceptions for police and the military, and Namiki Roberts cannot get a local concealed carry permit due to his citizenship. As such, he contends he is defenseless under Hawaii’s laws.

In the 14-page filing, attorneys Alan Beck and Stephen Stamboulieh outline that the would-be Taser owner is a self-employed photographer in the picturesque Pacific island chain and often carries expensive equipment. Although Nakimi Roberts has a clean criminal record and no history of mental problems that would prevent him from owning a firearm, he was told by Honolulu police that it would be illegal for him to possess a Taser either in his home to protect himself or nine-year-old daughter, or while out in public.

The filing pointed out the apparent flaws in the state’s law when compared to the 2008 Heller decision as well as Caetano, a 2016 Supreme Court case directly concerning stun guns which held the electric devices were bearable arms protected by the Second Amendment.

Beck told Guns.com that, post-Caetano, “It is clear that electric arms are protected by the Second Amendment and the State of Hawaii’s complete ban on electric arms is unconstitutional. It is my hope that the State of Hawaii will acknowledge that fact so that this case can have a quick resolution. However, if they do not, Mr. Stamboulieh and I are prepared to litigate this matter as long as needed to vindicate our client’s constitutional rights.”

Namiki Roberts is seeking for the courts to declare Hawaii’s law unconstitutional.

Since the Caetano case, a flood of lawsuits and pre-litigation letters has seen bans on the devices scrapped in Baltimore, New Jersey, New Orleans, Tacoma, Washington, D.C. and other cities. Litigation is pending in New York and Massachusetts.

When journalist Sara Zaske moved to Berlin with her family a few years ago, she noticed something different about German parents. They don't hover. They don't follow their kids on the playground or intervene when they fight. They let them go places on their own and play with knives and matches. Zaske was so struck by this cultural difference that she wrote a book about the six and a half years she spent raising her two kids there.

In "Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children," Zaske argues that the German practice of giving children more independence and responsibility early on fosters Selbständigkeit, or self-reliance, and creates more resilient and responsible grownups. Somewhat like Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé, Zaske believes that American parents should chill out a bit and not be so controlling, and their kids will still turn out just fine — maybe even better.

That sounds good, but is true? Peg Oliveira, PhD, a developmental psychologist and the executive director of the Gesell Institute for Child Development in New Haven, CT, agrees that in Germany, as well as other economically advanced countries, children are raised with more freedom than American children, "and the benefits seem to come through for them — they're more self-reliant."

But, Oliveira adds, this isn't a silver bullet. "I have a nine-year-old who's fairly independent, but I wouldn't hand her a token and expect her to navigate the bus system," she notes. "It's not like this is a recipe and because it worked there it'll work here."