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3 men sentenced to die in rape in India
NEW DELHI – An Indian court on Friday sentenced to death three men who raped a photojournalist inside an abandoned textile mill last year in Mumbai, India’s biggest city.
A fourth defendant was sentenced to life in prison, prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said. He said he asked for the death sentence under a strict anti-rape law introduced following public outrage over a fatal gang rape in New Delhi in 2012.
“This is the first case in India in which the death penalty has been given to convicts while the victim is alive,” Nikam said.
The three men were also found guilty last month of raping a call-center operator at the same abandoned mill in July 2013, a month before the attack on the photojournalist. Nikam described the three as habitual offenders.
Judge Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi said the offense was diabolical in nature, and the punishment would send a strong message to Indian society.
Argument led to attack, Army general says
FORT HOOD, Texas – The senior officer at Fort Hood says the mental condition of the soldier who fatally shot three soldiers and wounded 16 others earlier this week was not the “direct precipitating factor” in the shooting.
The comments Friday by Lt. Gen. Mark Milley came a day after he said Spc. Ivan Lopez’s mental condition appeared to be an underlying factor.
Milley said Friday that an “escalating argument” precipitated the attack.
Authorities say their investigation has found Lopez had an altercation Wednesday with soldiers in his unit that prompted the shooting.
U.S. regains all jobs lost during Great Recession
WASHINGTON – The U.S. economy has reached a milestone: It has finally regained all the private-sector jobs it lost during the Great Recession.
Yet it took a painfully slow six years, and unemployment remains stubbornly high at 6.7 percent.
The comeback figures were contained in a government report Friday that showed a solid if unspectacular month of job growth in March.
Businesses and nonprofits shed 8.8 million jobs during the 2007-09 recession; they have since hired 8.9 million.
But because the population has grown since the big downturn, most analysts were hardly celebrating the milestone.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, called it a “pretty meaningless benchmark economically.”
Associated Press
