SC: Can grant divorce on ground of irretrievable breakdown, can do away 6-month waiting
New Delhi: A constitution bench of the Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the court can dissolve a marriage in case of irretrievable breakdown by dispensing with the need for the waiting period as required under the marital laws.
A five-judge bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said, “It is possible for this court to dissolve the marriage on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of marriage that will not contravene the principles of public policy.”
The bench said, “We have held that the period of six months can be dispensed with subject to requirements and conditions as specified in the two judgments of this court…”
The bench said the court can invoke special power granted to it under Article 142 of the constitution to grant a divorce in such cases to do complete justice. It said powers of Article 142 must be exercised based on the fundamentals of public policy. Detailed judgment on the matter will be uploaded later in the day.
The top court’s verdict came on a batch of petitions regarding the use of the court’s plenary powers to dissolve a marriage between consenting parties without referral to family courts to wait for the mandatory period prescribed under the Hindu Marriage Act.
The final number of casualties is not quite confirmed but it is guaranteed to hurt. According to Christian Day, general secretary of the Rugby Players’ Association, at least 100 current Premiership squad members will shortly be left without a contract, victims of the stark financial realities gripping the English club game. “The market is incredibly squeezed,” says Day. “We’re looking at 10 senior players per squad not being there next year.”
Maybe one or two will be fortunate and find a summer trial somewhere. The implications of the Premiership’s reduced £5m salary cap, however, threaten to wreck a lot of dreams. Some clubs have been shedding truckloads of academy pros, others have made derisory offers that no full-time athlete could reasonably accept. “The last two years have been the most testing and challenging for rugby union as a professional sport since the early days when everyone was flying blind,” says Day. “We’re trying to help with that.”
But even as Day spells out his determination to negotiate for a proper minimum wage and a benevolent fund for past players, a much bigger truth is increasingly hard to ignore. There is foolhardy and then there is the bone-headed stupidity of those who think pro rugby alone will set them up for life. Rarely has there been a worse time to put all your eggs in rugby’s increasingly wobbly basket.
To the RPA’s credit, things have come on slightly since Day started as a young pro in 2003. Back then there was barely any support or pastoral care for those suddenly deemed surplus to requirements. This year 91% of players in the league expressed an interest in developing themselves beyond rugby and 62% of those enrolled on educational or vocational courses. More than 100 education grants have also been approved to help players prepare for life outside the dressing room bubble.
In many ways, though, that is the easy bit. Tick the box and on we go. Rather harder for those tiptoeing back into the real world is to replicate the weekly adrenaline rush to which they have become addicted. Or, tougher still, to peel back the layers of their institutionalised past and find something that might yield lasting happiness and long-term fulfilment.
Luckily there are people like Geoff Griffiths around to offer a helping hand. In a former life, Griffiths played in the back three for, among others, Blackheath, Esher, Plymouth Albion, Rotherham and Bedford. These days he is the owner and chief executive of the digital marketing agency Builtvisible and also specialises in assisting players who find themselves at a crossroads in their lives.
Together with his sister Nicola, a clinical psychologist, he has launched Tackling Transition to help professional athletes to take control of their transition out of sport. He reckons there remains a significant need for it. “I’ve got a couple of retired Premiership players who say they wish there was something like this before. One of them was bumbling his way through in a dead-end job that he didn’t really care about. Another told me he felt like he was just an academy player again. One minute he’d been playing in front of 80,000 people for Harlequins, the next he was stuck in an office somewhere.”
Everyone knows playing rugby cannot last for ever but, equally, it is possible to be pigeonholed once you stop. “What happens in rugby, in particular, is that people get pushed into finance or brokerage … things where you’re classically going to be good at because of your transferable skills.” But what if they had thought about things a little bit more and stopped to consider what their real passion might be? Acting? Writing? One of Griffiths’s former teammates is the BBC’s Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse, with whom he played at Rotherham, Plymouth and Esher. Another is Ben Mercer, author of the excellent rugby book Fringes. All of them were sufficiently smart to understand the need to look beyond rugby even when they were fully immersed in it.
Worcester in action at Sixways in 2021. The Warriors’ collapse offered a sobering reminder of rugby’s finances. Photograph: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images
Something else Griffiths mentions strikes a chord. He spent eight years playing in the Championship and National One and reckons the best times he had were at Blackheath in National One. “I had a balance because I was building a career and using rugby as an escape rather than it being all-consuming. As a result I played better rugby. Being more well-rounded is obviously of enormous benefit and will actually improve your performance because you can switch off. A more balanced person is a better athlete.”
It became obvious to him, too, that players from Premiership clubs who pitched up on loan often fell into one of two categories: those who made the effort to engage and socialise and those who were simply marking time. “You knew the ones who would be successful people and you knew the ones who were chasing a rugby career. The former are doing better now than the ones who maybe got a handful of Premiership starts but were never going to be world-beaters. The interesting thing with rugby is that the financials aren’t really good enough to justify being all-in. Who’s making forever money in rugby?”
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It is among the lessons he now tries to pass on, to avoid players ending up completely lost. “When [France’s] Christophe Dominici passed away in 2020 it really brought it home. I don’t think that’s the norm but there are countless stories of people struggling after their career is over. I think psychology is becoming a bigger thing on the performance side but there is a gap when a player’s career ends. Brutally, that’s not something the clubs are tasked with doing.”
Which is why Griffiths wants to try to alert them to their hidden potential. “I was talking to another guy who has just retired from the Premiership. He was saying that a lot of stuff around transition comes across as very negative. We want it to be a positive. The empowerment thing is massive. The better you understand yourself while you’re in rugby, the better armed and equipped you are. And the sooner you do something the better. Anything’s better than it being too late.” Plenty to ponder there, even for those still clinging to a Premiership contract.
In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, Mental Health America is available on 800-273-8255. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Coordination between federal agencies responsible for counterterrorism and their state and local counterparts — a crucial ingredient of the overall law-enforcement effort — is also a serious problem. There is no federal mandate for state and local authorities to report to federal authorities, so federal agencies must proactively elicit their cooperation. But non-federal agencies often have little interest in this work, because they entertain lower threat perceptions, contentious legal understandings or adverse conceptions of the role of government.
In exceptional cases, county law-enforcement officials may not regard a vocally anti-government gun owner as a present danger or even as ideological, and may consider the state government the highest one to which they are answerable. And while most state and local officers are duly concerned about employee grievances, which often do produce mass-casualty events, many of these officers are indifferent to ideological ones.
The net effect is that there is no nationwide structure that provides federal agencies with effective interlocutors at the state or local level. Some pockets of excellence exist, but they are not replicated at scale. Furthermore, while U.S. intelligence agencies have the capabilities needed to map far-right groups, for good constitutional reasons they can’t freely apply those capabilities at the domestic level.
The face of the state, therefore, is federal law enforcement — and this is no more conducive to winning hearts and minds in the U.S. hinterland than it is in the fight against Muslim extremism in Leeds or Molenbeek. At the same time, gaps in domestic counterterrorism arrangements leave space for far-right radicalism to continue to flourish.
By virtue of Jan. 6 and the increasing normalization of domestic political violence, senior U.S. officials already have strategic warning. That means they most value tactical warning, yet that’s harder to come by. In terms of combustibility, of course, the United States is not comparable to Bolshevik Russia and Enrique Tarrio is no Vladimir Lenin. U.S. militia groups do not appear to be strongly networked. Yet it would be imprudent to assume that the MAGA movement is still just an inchoate insurgency, as its grievances are widely shared. Law enforcement’s limitations suggest that the key factor in staving off civil breakdown is not state power but rather political dynamics.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, commonly shortened to Lufthansa, is the flag carrier of Germany.
Frankfurt: An IT breakdown at Lufthansa on Wednesday caused flight delays and cancellations at major German airports, upending the travel plans of thousands of passengers.
Since Wednesday morning, planes and passengers have been jammed in Frankfurt and Munich airports because the computer systems for check-in and boarding, among other things, were no longer operational, Xinhua news agency reported.
“During construction work in Frankfurt, fiber optic cables belonging to a telecom service provider were damaged, causing an outage of Lufthansa’s IT systems at Frankfurt Airport,” Lufthansa tweeted.
⚠️Important information on flight disruption: As of this morning the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage, caused by construction work in the Frankfurt region. Unfortunately, this has led to flight delays and cancellations. We are working on –
“Flight operations are expected to stabilize in the early evening,” it added.
Due to the serious IT glitch at Lufthansa, German air traffic control is no longer routing aircraft to Frankfurt Airport to prevent the hub from filling up, said an air traffic control spokesman. The planes will be diverted to other airports such as Nuremberg, Cologne or Dusseldorf.
Peshawar: Pakistan’s Minister for Power Khurram Dastgir said the government is probing the massive January 22 electricity outage across the country from different angles as the possibility of a cyberattack on the system cannot be ruled out.
“An inquiry will be completed very soon. Although there are very fewer chances, a cyberattack on the national grid cannot be ruled out,” Dawn news quoted Dastgir as saying at a news conference.
The Minister said that a probe had been ordered immediately into the power breakdown, adding that a detailed report would soon be submitted to the ministry.
Last week, Dastgir had said that they have not been able to find out the reason behind the fault that caused the countrywide power breakdown, adding the federal government will also probe the possibility of “foreign intervention” into this, The News reported.
A major power breakdown caused by “frequency variation” in the transmission system, hit large areas of the country at around 7.30 in the morning on January 22.
The electricity wasn’t fully restored till late at night, bringing life to a standstill in Pakistan as several cities were left without electricity.
“There are concerns, and have to be investigated if a foreign intervention was made via hacking our power distribution system,” Dastagir had said.
The Minister said that the “possibility of foreign intervention through the internet is low”, however, the matter will be probed as there have been multiple incidents recently, The News reported.
