Default bail cancellation can be considered on merit, says SC

• Also known as statutory bail, this is a right to bail that accrues when the police fail to complete investigation within a specified period in respect of a person in judicial custody.
• This is enshrined in Section 167(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) where it is not possible for the police to complete an investigation in 24 hours, the police produce the suspect in court and seek orders for either police or judicial custody.
• Under Section 167(2) of the Code, a Magistrate can order an accused person to be detained in the custody of the police for 15 days. Beyond the police custody period of 15 days, the Magistrate can authorize the detention of the accused person in judicial custody i.e., jail if necessary. However, the accused cannot be detained for more than:
  • ninety days, when an authority is investigating an offense punishable with death, life imprisonment or imprisonment for at least ten years; or
  • sixty days, when the authority is investigating any other offense.
  • In some other special laws like Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, this period may vary. For eg: In Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, the period is 180 days.
• At the end of this period, if the investigation is not complete, the court shall release the person “if he is prepared to and does furnish bail”. This is known as default bail.

Principles:

• It is a right, regardless of the nature of the crime.
• The stipulated period within which the charge sheet has to be filed begins from the day the accused is remanded for the first time.
• It includes days undergone in both police and judicial custody, but not days spent in house-arrest.
• A requirement for the grant of statutory bail is that the right should be claimed by the person in custody.
• If the charge sheet is not filed within the stipulated period, but there is no application for bail under Section 167(2), there is no automatic bail.
• Once the accused files an application for bail under Section 167(2), it is considered that he/she has enforced the right to be released on default bail.
• This right only comes into place after the stipulated time limit for investigation has expired.
• If the accused fails to apply for default bail after the investigation time period has expired, and the investigating agency files a charge-sheet or seeks more time before the accused makes such an application for default bail, then the right of default bail is no longer applicable.
• The Magistrate can then grant further time for completion of the investigation.
• However, the accused may still be released on bail under other legal provisions of the Code.

Default Bail as Fundamental Right:

• The Supreme Court while hearing an appeal regarding default bail said that default bail under first proviso of Section 167(2) of the Cr.P.C. is a fundamental right and not merely a statutory right as it is, a procedure established by law under Article 21 of the Constitution.

People ''dress like a cabbage'' to survive world''s coldest city

• Yakutsk city is located 5,000 km (3,100 miles) east of Moscow on the permafrost of the Russian Far East.
• Yakutsk is the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia.
• The city is about 450 km to the south of the Arctic Circle.
• The temperature often drops below minus 40.
• While Yakutsk holds the record as the world''s coldest city, it is also the one with the greatest variation in temperatur

Permafrost

• Permafrost is any ground that remains completely frozen—32°F (0°C) or colder—for at least two years straight.
• Permafrost is made of a combination of soil, rocks and sand that are held together by ice.
• The soil and ice in permafrost stay frozen all year long.
• Permafrost can be found on land and below the ocean floor.
• These permanently frozen grounds are most common in regions with high mountains and in Earth’s higher latitudes—near the North and South Poles.

Researchers discover ruins of 2,000-year-old Mayan town buried in Guatemala''s rainforest

• The discovery was made using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) by a team of researchers from several American universities as well as collaborators from France and Guatemala.

Mayan Civilization

• The Maya are probably the best-known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica.
• Originating in the Yucatán peninsula around 2600 B.C., they rose to prominence around A.D. 250 in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.
• Building on the inherited inventions and ideas of earlier civilizations, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing.
• The Maya were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built without metal tools.
• They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater.
• The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples.
• The Maya made paper from the inner bark of wild fig trees and wrote their hieroglyphs on books made from this paper. Those books are called codices.
• Their society consisted of many independent states, each with a rural farming community and large urban sites built around ceremonial centers. It started to decline around A.D. 900.
• The Maya peoples never disappeared, neither at the time of the Classic period decline nor with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors and the subsequent Spanish colonization of the Americas.
• The Maya remain in contemporary Mesoamerican societies, and maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs, combined with more recent practices such as the almost total adoption of Roman Catholicism.

Yucatan Peninsula

• The Yucatan Peninsula is Mexico’s southeastern projection, extending into the Atlantic Ocean.
• It separates the Gulf of Mexico to the north and west and the Caribbean Sea to the east.

Mesoamerica

• It refers to a geographical and cultural area which extends from central Mexico down through Central America, including the territory which is now made up of the countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.

LiDAR (light detection and ranging)

• It is a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges (variable distances) to the Earth.
• These light pulses—combined with other data recorded by the airborne system — generate precise, three-dimensional information about the shape of the Earth and its surface characteristics.

Nepal plane crash | Both black boxes recovered; four people still missing

• Search teams retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders of a passenger plane that plummeted into a gorge on approach to a new airport in the foothills of the Himalayas, officials said, as investigators looked for the cause of Nepal’s deadliest plane crash in 30 years.

Black Box

• A flight recorder, byname black box, is an instrument that records the performance and condition of an aircraft in flight.
• Governmental regulatory agencies require these devices on commercial aircraft to make possible the analysis of crashes or other unusual occurrences.
• A black box refers to two pieces of equipment together – the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Flight Data Recorder (FDR).
• Together, they provide investigators the data needed to identify what led to a flight crash.
• Flight Data Recorder(FDR):
• The FDR records many variables, not only basic aircraft conditions such as airspeed, altitude, heading, vertical acceleration, and pitch but also hundreds of individual instrument readings and internal environmental conditions that can help narrow down a flight''s path and what may have gone wrong in its last moments.
• FDRs are also made to survive depths over 6,000 meters underwater, while still relaying signals.
• Cockpit Voice Recorder:
• The CVR records verbal communication between crew members within the aircraft’s cockpit as well as voice transmissions by radio.
• Aircraft sounds audible in the cockpit are also caught on the recorder.
• Flight recorders are commonly carried in the tail of the aircraft, which is usually the structure that is subject to the least impact in the event of a crash.
• In spite of the popular name black box, flight recorders are painted a highly visible vermilion color known as “international orange".

MFs’ SIP collection jumps 31% to ₹1.5 lakh cr. in 2022 on higher retail participation

• Contributions to mutual fund schemes through systematic investment plans, or SIPs, remain unfazed from the market volatility in 2022 with inflow growing to ₹1.5 lakh crore in 2022, a surge of 31% from a year earlier, due to higher retail participation.

Systematic Investment Plan (SIP)

• SIP is an investment methodology offered by mutual funds wherein an individual saver can invest a fixed amount in a chosen scheme periodically at fixed intervals say once a month, instead of making a lump sum investment.
• The SIP installment amount can be as small as ₹500 per month and is similar to a recurring deposit.
• SIPs help to achieve financial goals by investing small sums of money on a monthly basis that eventually leads to accumulating the required corpus for reaching the goal.

Benefits of SIP:

• SIP’s bring in an investment discipline for the investor.
• SIPs are done in open-ended funds where the investors can invest and take out the money anytime.
• There is no fixed tenor for running SIP. Once the SIP tenor is fixed, it can BE stopped in between or could be continued even after the tenor by placing the request with the respective mutual fund company.
• Full and partial withdrawal is possible during or after the SIP tenor.
• The SIP amount can be increased or decreased.

Mutual Fund:

• A mutual fund is a pool of money managed by a professional Fund Manager.
• It is a trust that collects money from a number of investors who share a common investment objective and invests the same in equities, bonds, money market instruments and/or other securities.
• The income / gains generated from this collective investment is distributed proportionately amongst the investors after deducting applicable expenses and levies.

4 snow leopards spotted in rare sighting in Himachal Pradesh

• It is found in the mountainous regions of central and southern Asia.
• In India, it is seen in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh.
• The Hemis National Parkhas a good presence of Snow Leopard.
• They play a key role as a top predator, an indicator of the health of their high-altitude habitat, and, increasingly, an important indicator of the impacts of climate change on mountain environments.

Conservation status

• IUCN Red List: Vulnerable
• Under CITES it is listed in Appendix I
• Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972:Schedule I

Indian scientist-led team first to find evidence of solitary waves in Mars magnetosphere

• With the help of high-resolution electric field data recorded by the Langmuir Probe and Waves instrument on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft of NASA researchers identified the solitary waves.

Solitary wave

• Solitary waves are distinct electric field fluctuations (bipolar or monopolar) that follow constant amplitude-phase relations.
• Their shape and size are less affected during their propagation.
• The magnitude and duration of these pulses are found to be 1-25 milivolt/meter and 0.2–1.7 milliseconds, respectively.
• These pulses are dominantly seen in the dawn and afternoon dusk sectors at an altitude of 1000–3500 km around Mars.
• Through simulations, it is found that the spatial extent of these structures is very small (30-330 meters). As these waves are known to be responsible for the plasma energization and its transport in Earth’s magnetosphere

MAVEN spacecraft

• The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which launched in 2013.
• It is the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.
• The goal of this spacecraft is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.

ISRO pushing Venus mission ''Shukrayaan'' to 2031?

• It is also called the Venus Mission.
• The Shukrayaan I mission will be an orbiter mission.
• Its scientific payloads currently include a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar and a ground-penetrating radar.
• The mission is expected to study Venus’s geological and volcanic activity, emissions on the ground, wind speed, cloud cover, and other planetary characteristics from an elliptical orbit.
• Optimal launch windows from Earth to Venus occur once every 19 months.

Venus

• Venus is often called "Earth’s twin" because they’re similar in size and structure, but Venus has extreme surface heat and a dense, toxic atmosphere.
• It rotates very slowly on its axis – one day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days.
• The thick atmosphere of Venus traps heat creating a runaway greenhouse effect – making it the hottest planet in our solar system.
• Phosphine, a possible indicator of microbial life, has been observed in the clouds of Venus.
• Unlike the other planets in our solar system, Venus spins clockwise on its axis.

21st EDITION OF INDIA FRANCE BILATERAL NAVAL EXERCISE ‘VARUNA’ – 2023

• It is the Bilateral Naval Exercise between India and France.
• This bilateral exercise between the two navies was initiated in 1993.
• It was named ‘VARUNA’ in 2001 and has become a hallmark of India France strategic bilateral relationship.
• This edition will witness the participation of indigenous guided missile stealth destroyer INS Chennai, guided missile frigate INS Teg, maritime patrol aircraft P-8I and Dornier, integral helicopters and MiG29K fighter aircraft.
• The French Navy will be represented by the aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle, frigates FS Forbin and Provence, support vessel FS Marne and maritime patrol aircraft Atlantique.
• The exercise will be conducted over five days from 16 to 20 January 2023 and will witness advanced air defence exercises, tactical manoeuvres, surface firings, underway replenishment and other maritime operations.
• Units of both navies will endeavour to hone their war-fighting skills in maritime theatre, enhance their inter-operability to undertake multi-discipline operations in the maritime domain and demonstrate their ability as an integrated force to promote peace, security and stability in the region.