The NEWS

Iran’s hardline judiciary chief ­Ebrahim Raisi won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election, a vote that both propelled the supreme leader’s protege into Tehran’s highest civilian position and saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Raisi was involved in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.

Over a dozen cases of the “Delta plus” variant of the coronavirus have been detected in India, with 16 of them reported from Maharashtra. India is among nine countries where the Delta plus mutation has been found so far, Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan has said, underlining that it is a “variant of interest” and not yet a “variant of concern”.

A court in Shimla has sentenced a 28-year-old man to jail for the rest of his natural life in the Gudiya rape and murder case. The woodcutter is convicted of raping and killing the 16-year-old girl in a forest in Shimla’s Kotkhai when she was returning home from school on July 4, 2017. Her mother alleges that more people were involved in the crime.