The Evening Wrap: Supreme Court to look into Bilkis Bano’s petitions against release of 11 convicts

Chief Justice of India D. Y. Chandrachud on November 30 agreed to look into the listing of two petitions filed by Bilkis Bano, who was gangraped in the Gujarat riots, against the Gujarat Government’s decision to prematurely release 11 convicts serving life sentence in her case. Making an oral mentioning before the CJI’s Bench, advocate Shobha Gupta, for Bano, said her client has filed a review petition against a Supreme Court decision in May 2022 to allow Gujarat Government to consider the plea for early release of the convicts under the State’s Premature Release Policy of 1992. Gupta said the remission policy of the State of Maharashtra, where the trial happened, and not Gujarat would have governed the case. The apex court had in May 2022 held that remission would be considered as per the policy which was in vogue at the time of conviction. The court’s judgment had come in a plea filed by one of the 11 convicts, Radheshyam Bhagwandas Shah. The court had even directed the Gujarat Government to consider the application of Shah within two months. Bano has also challenged the release in a separate writ petition, arguing that the release affected her fundamental right to life. Gupta said connected petitions filed by CPI (M) leader Subhashini Ali and others had were listed before a Bench led by Justice Ajay Rastogi on November 29, but was not taken up as the judge was part of a Constitution Bench hearing the Jallikattu case. She said the case needed to be heard urgently. The CJI said the review petition may have to be listed first. When Gupta sought an open court hearing, as review petitions are usually heard in chambers by circulation, the CJI said that would be for the judges concerned to decide. The petitions filed by Ali and others like TMC leader Mahua Moitra were last heard by Justice Rastogi’s Bench on October 18. The court had given the petitioners time to respond to a Gujarat Government affidavit which showed that the Special Judge and the CBI in Mumbai had opposed the premature release of the 11 convicts. The case had then been listed for November 29. The affidavit by the State of Gujarat had revealed that while the Superintendent of Police, CBI, Special Crime Branch, Mumbai and the Special Judge (CBI) of Greater Bombay opposed the premature release, all the authorities in Gujarat and the Home Ministry recommended their release. “All the prisoners have completed 14-plus years in the prison under life imprisonment and opinions of the authorities concerned have been obtained as per the premature release policy of 1992 and submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs vide letter dated June 28, 2022 and sought the approval of the Government of India. The Government of India conveyed the concurrence/approval of the Central government under Section 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for premature release of 11 prisoners in a letter on July 11, 2022,” the 57-page affidavit had said. The State had clarified that, contrary to popular perceptions, the early release of the 11 convicts was not as per a circular allowing remission to prisoners as part of the celebration of ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’. The State Government had maintained that it followed the 1992 Premature Release Policy. The remission was granted on August 10, 2022. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for Gujarat, and advocate Rishi Malhotra, for the accused, had both challenged the locus standi of “third party petitioners” to challenge the premature release. They had dubbed the petitioners as “interlopers”. India’s GDP grows at 6.3% in July-September quarter India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew 6.3% in the July to September quarter, with the Gross Value Added (GVA) in the economy rising 5.6%, as per estimates released by the National Statistical Office. The first quarter of the year had clocked GDP growth of 13.5%, with GVA rising 12.7%. While GVA from agriculture accelerated to rise 4.6% in the second quarter, manufacturing and mining GVA contracted 4.3% and 2.8%, respectively, in the second quarter, compared to a year ago. The sharpest GVA growth in Q2 was reported by the trade, hotels, transport, communication & services related to the broadcasting segment, which grew 14.7%, followed by financial, real estate and professional services, whose GVA increased 7.2%, and construction which was up 6.6%. For the first half of 2022-23, the Indian economy has recorded a 9.7% growth in GDP, compared to 13.7% in the same period last year, with GVA rising 9%, compared to its 12.8% surge between April 2021 and September 2021. Nadav Lapid stands by his comments on ‘The Kashmir Files’, says can recognise ‘propaganda disguised as a movie’ Unfazed by the widespread criticism of his comments against the Hindi film ‘The Kashmir Files’, Israeli director and IFFI international jury chair Nadav Lapid said he stands by his remarks as he “knows how to recognise propaganda disguised as a movie”. Reacting to the backlash he received for calling ‘The Kashmir Files’ a “vulgar” and “propaganda” movie, Lapid said making bad films is not a crime, but the Vivek Agnihotri directorial is “crude, manipulative and violent”. “Making bad films is not a crime, but this is a very crude, manipulative and violent propaganda film,” Lapid said in an interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. According to the filmmaker, he felt it was his “duty” to speak his mind as the head of the international jury. “The truth is that I also couldn’t help but imagine a similar situation that might happen one day soon in Israel, and I would be happy that in such a situation the head of a foreign jury would be willing to say things as he sees them. In a way, I felt it was my duty to the place that invited me,” he said. The award-winning filmmaker had called out ‘The Kashmir Files’, which was screened at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on November 22 under the Indian Panorama section, at the closing ceremony of the nine-day festival in Goa on Monday. Lapid said that ‘The Kashmir Files’ was “pushed into the official competition” of the festival. “We learned that the film was pushed into the official competition of the festival due to political pressure... I feel as a foreigner who arrives there, you have an obligation to say the things that the people who live there may have a harder time saying. In such contexts I don’t believe in secrets and whispers. If you stand on stage and are asked to speak, what will you talk about? Only about the beaches you saw and the food you ate?” the filmmaker said. When asked if he had in-depth knowledge of the Kashmir conflict to draw such conclusions, Lapid accepted he “of course did not know enough”. He, however, defended himself saying “you can also watch films by Leni Riefenstahl [a German filmmaker who glorified the Nazi Party] and know what you’re seeing, without being a great expert on that period”. “There are cases that are nuanced, but this is not the case. In a way, ‘The Kashmir Files’ makes life easy because it is so bare and aggressive, that it doesn’t even mask itself intelligently,” said the Paris-based director. On the criticism he has received from Israel diplomats in India, Lapid said his comments were “political” but not representative of his country. Amid the social media backlash and on-ground protests by Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu, the acclaimed director found support in Congress leader Supriya Shrinate, Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, and actor Swara Bhasker. He claimed he has received hundreds of emails and messages from cine personalities from India “who are happy about it” and for them “finally things were said that they believed in”. “Since this is a film that the Indian Government encourages, I assume that the government there is not happy about it. But is a country only about its government? I assume not. What I said is not comfortable for the Government of India, nor for the government in the making in Israel, which the ambassador there represents,” Lapid asserted. Asked if he would change anything in the way he expressed his opinion that led to the uproar, Lapid said he was invited to the festival as a director and he talked about a film’s subject. “I did not come to express one position or another on the conflict in Kashmir...” he said. In another interview to Israel’s news website Ynet, Lapid said at the IFFI stage India’s Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting Anurag Thakur and Israel’s ambassador discussed “fighting a similar enemy and [being] in a bad neighbourhood”. In response to Lapid’s claims, ambassador Gilon on Tuesday shared an open letter on Twitter calling out the filmmaker for misquoting him. “I understand your need in retrospect to ‘justify’ your behaviour but I can’t understand why you told [Israeli] Ynet afterwards that the minister and I said on stage that there is similarity between our countries because ‘we fight a similar enemy and reside in a bad neighbourhood’,” Gilon said. In the interview to Ynet, Lapid also said he shared his views at the closing ceremony with a lot of “discomfort and apprehension”. “I knew that this was an event that is terribly connected to the country, and everyone stands there and praises the government. It is not an easy position, because you are a guest. “I am the president of the jury here, you are treated very nicely. And then you come and attack the festival. There was apprehension, and there was discomfort,” he said. In countries that are increasingly losing the ability to speak the truth, “someone needs to speak up”, he said. “When I saw this movie, I couldn’t help but imagine its Israeli equivalent, which doesn’t exist but could definitely exist. So I felt I had to, because I come from a place that is itself not reformed, and is itself headed this way,” Lapid added. Jiang Zemin obituary: President who shepherded China’s economic reforms, growth Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who led China during a decade of extraordinary economic growth, passed away in Shanghai on November 30, aged 96. Jiang’s death comes at an extraordinary time for Chinese politics, and days after protests in many Chinese cities on a scale not seen since 1989, a year when the death of a pro-reform leader, Hu Yaobang, catalysed a pro-democracy student moment. For many in China, the decade until 2002 under Jiang and former Premier Zhu Rongji is still remembered as an era of relative openness and of unprecedented economic opportunity. Jiang took over amid the chaos of 1989 and the brutal crackdown of the pro-democracy movement, handpicked by then leader Deng Xiaoping as the man to guide China out of a sensitive moment. His biggest legacy will be his shepherding of China’s economic reforms and growth. The economy grew five-fold during this time, from $347 billion in 1989 to $1.47 trillion in 2002. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 were two landmark moments of the Jiang era. “This period is sometimes treated as an interregnum between two really tall leaders, Deng Xiaoping on the one hand and Xi Jinping on the other, who dominate the landscape, but these were in fact the most productive years of Communist China’s history,” Vijay Gokhale, former Foreign Secretary, envoy to China, and author of “After Tiananmen: The Rise of China”, told The Hindu. “This was in no small measure due to the leadership of the people who ruled China at the time — Jiang, Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,” he said. “We cannot understand China’s great power ambitions if we don’t understand this period when they laid all the building blocks for it, whether the modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, a multidimensional foreign policy, attracting Foreign Direct Investment into China, or technology leapfrogging.” If the Jiang period saw a transformation of China’s place in the world — and marked both its rise as a global trading superpower and a period of extraordinary dependency between China and the West — his biggest legacy at home was reshaping Chinese politics to the needs of the economic reform era. Jiang worked to overcome the political opposition to Communist China’s embrace of capitalism, captured in his official ideology which is called the “Three Represents” and was added to the Party Constitution. It stated that the Party would not only represent workers, farmers and Communists, but also all of China’s “advanced productive forces”, cultural elements, and the “fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people”. It paved the way for businesspeople and entrepreneurs to join the Party’s ranks and to de-emphasise the role of ideology in the party, a trend that carried on in the Hu Jintao era. The current leader, Xi, has in the eyes of many observers in Beijing reversed that trend by once again reemphasising the centrality of the Party. The retreat of the Party from the lives of people saw an era of relative openness, although Jiang, like his predecessor Deng, cracked down on any and all spaces that were seen as challenging its rule, such as the once popular Falun Gong movement which was crushed under a nationwide crackdown in 1999. Jiang, who retired in 2002, remained influential behind the scenes in the Hu Jintao years, with many of his political appointees occupying top Party positions. More recently, following Xi’s coming to power in 2012, he stayed out of the public spotlight, largely due to ill health. State media reported he passed away due to leukemia and multiple organ failure. In recent years, Jiang garnered somewhat of a cult status for some on Chinese social media, remembered as the last of charismatic and relatively open leaders, and a contrast to his successors. He often broke into song or English, and memorably conducted an orchestra in the presence of Bill Clinton, a video that went viral on social media after his passing. His death could not have come at a more sensitive time for China’s current leader, Xi, who has in recent days been confronting the biggest challenge to his rule with protests against lockdowns and the “zero-Covid” policy over the weekend. Chinese cities have this week seen a stepped up deployment of police to thwart further protests and public gatherings, as well as increased online censorship. As online tributes to Jiang flooded social media on November 30, the leadership now faces a delicate task of organising a state tribute to bid farewell to the leader at a heated political moment in China. In Brief: The U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation Tuesday to protect same-sex marriages, an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalised gay marriage nationwide. The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 on Tuesday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.” Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress. The legislation now moves to the House for a final vote. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. [logo] The Evening Wrap 30 NOVEMBER 2022 [The Hindu logo] Welcome to the Evening Wrap newsletter, your guide to the day’s biggest stories with concise analysis from The Hindu. [[Arrow]Open in browser]( [[Mail icon]More newsletters]( Dear reader, We have now made it easier for you to manage your The Hindu newsletter subscriptions in one place! 1. Visit [The Hindu newsletters page]( 2. Click MANAGE tab and then click LOGIN / SIGN UP 3. If you don’t have an account with The Hindu, please click SIGN UP OR If you already have an account with The Hindu with this email ID, please login using the email ID Supreme Court to look into Bilkis Bano’s petitions against release of 11 convicts Chief Justice of India D. Y. Chandrachud on November 30 agreed to look into the [listing of two petitions filed by Bilkis Bano]( who was gangraped in the Gujarat riots, against the Gujarat Government’s decision to prematurely release 11 convicts serving life sentence in her case. Making an oral mentioning before the CJI’s Bench, advocate Shobha Gupta, for Bano, said her client has filed a review petition against a Supreme Court decision in May 2022 to allow Gujarat Government to consider the plea for early release of the convicts under the State’s Premature Release Policy of 1992. Gupta said the remission policy of the State of Maharashtra, where the trial happened, and not Gujarat would have governed the case. The apex court had in May 2022 held that remission would be considered as per the policy which was in vogue at the time of conviction. The court’s judgment had come in a plea filed by one of the 11 convicts, Radheshyam Bhagwandas Shah. The court had even directed the Gujarat Government to consider the application of Shah within two months. Bano has also challenged the release in a separate writ petition, arguing that the release affected her fundamental right to life. Gupta said connected petitions filed by CPI (M) leader Subhashini Ali and others had were listed before a Bench led by Justice Ajay Rastogi on November 29, but was not taken up as the judge was part of a Constitution Bench hearing the Jallikattu case. She said the case needed to be heard urgently. The CJI said the review petition may have to be listed first. When Gupta sought an open court hearing, as review petitions are usually heard in chambers by circulation, the CJI said that would be for the judges concerned to decide. The petitions filed by Ali and others like TMC leader Mahua Moitra were last heard by Justice Rastogi’s Bench on October 18. The court had given the petitioners time to respond to a Gujarat Government affidavit which showed that the Special Judge and the CBI in Mumbai had opposed the premature release of the 11 convicts. The case had then been listed for November 29. The affidavit by the State of Gujarat had revealed that while the Superintendent of Police, CBI, Special Crime Branch, Mumbai and the Special Judge (CBI) of Greater Bombay opposed the premature release, all the authorities in Gujarat and the Home Ministry recommended their release. “All the prisoners have completed 14-plus years in the prison under life imprisonment and opinions of the authorities concerned have been obtained as per the premature release policy of 1992 and submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs vide letter dated June 28, 2022 and sought the approval of the Government of India. The Government of India conveyed the concurrence/approval of the Central government under Section 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for premature release of 11 prisoners in a letter on July 11, 2022,” the 57-page affidavit had said. The State had clarified that, contrary to popular perceptions, the early release of the 11 convicts was not as per a circular allowing remission to prisoners as part of the celebration of ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’. The State Government had maintained that it followed the 1992 Premature Release Policy. The remission was granted on August 10, 2022. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for Gujarat, and advocate Rishi Malhotra, for the accused, had both challenged the locus standi of “third party petitioners” to challenge the premature release. They had dubbed the petitioners as “interlopers”. India’s GDP grows at 6.3% in July-September quarter India’s Gross Domestic Product [(GDP) grew 6.3% in the July to September quarter]( with the Gross Value Added (GVA) in the economy rising 5.6%, as per estimates released by the National Statistical Office. The first quarter of the year had clocked GDP growth of 13.5%, with GVA rising 12.7%. While GVA from agriculture accelerated to rise 4.6% in the second quarter, manufacturing and mining GVA contracted 4.3% and 2.8%, respectively, in the second quarter, compared to a year ago. The sharpest GVA growth in Q2 was reported by the trade, hotels, transport, communication & services related to the broadcasting segment, which grew 14.7%, followed by financial, real estate and professional services, whose GVA increased 7.2%, and construction which was up 6.6%. For the first half of 2022-23, the Indian economy has recorded a 9.7% growth in GDP, compared to 13.7% in the same period last year, with GVA rising 9%, compared to its 12.8% surge between April 2021 and September 2021. Nadav Lapid stands by his comments on ‘The Kashmir Files’, says can recognise ‘propaganda disguised as a movie’ Unfazed by the widespread criticism of his comments against the Hindi film ‘The Kashmir Files’, Israeli director and IFFI international jury chair [Nadav Lapid said he stands by his remarks]( as he “knows how to recognise propaganda disguised as a movie”. Reacting to the backlash he received for calling ‘The Kashmir Files’ a “vulgar” and “propaganda” movie, Lapid said making bad films is not a crime, but the Vivek Agnihotri directorial is “crude, manipulative and violent”. “Making bad films is not a crime, but this is a very crude, manipulative and violent propaganda film,” Lapid said in an interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. According to the filmmaker, he felt it was his “duty” to speak his mind as the head of the international jury. “The truth is that I also couldn’t help but imagine a similar situation that might happen one day soon in Israel, and I would be happy that in such a situation the head of a foreign jury would be willing to say things as he sees them. In a way, I felt it was my duty to the place that invited me,” he said. The award-winning filmmaker had called out ‘The Kashmir Files’, which was screened at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on November 22 under the Indian Panorama section, at the closing ceremony of the nine-day festival in Goa on Monday. Lapid said that ‘The Kashmir Files’ was “pushed into the official competition” of the festival. “We learned that the film was pushed into the official competition of the festival due to political pressure... I feel as a foreigner who arrives there, you have an obligation to say the things that the people who live there may have a harder time saying. In such contexts I don’t believe in secrets and whispers. If you stand on stage and are asked to speak, what will you talk about? Only about the beaches you saw and the food you ate?” the filmmaker said. When asked if he had in-depth knowledge of the Kashmir conflict to draw such conclusions, Lapid accepted he “of course did not know enough”. He, however, defended himself saying “you can also watch films by Leni Riefenstahl [a German filmmaker who glorified the Nazi Party] and know what you’re seeing, without being a great expert on that period”. “There are cases that are nuanced, but this is not the case. In a way, ‘The Kashmir Files’ makes life easy because it is so bare and aggressive, that it doesn’t even mask itself intelligently,” said the Paris-based director. On the criticism he has received from Israel diplomats in India, Lapid said his comments were “political” but not representative of his country. Amid the social media backlash and on-ground protests by Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu, the acclaimed director found support in Congress leader Supriya Shrinate, Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, and actor Swara Bhasker. He claimed he has received hundreds of emails and messages from cine personalities from India “who are happy about it” and for them “finally things were said that they believed in”. “Since this is a film that the Indian Government encourages, I assume that the government there is not happy about it. But is a country only about its government? I assume not. What I said is not comfortable for the Government of India, nor for the government in the making in Israel, which the ambassador there represents,” Lapid asserted. Asked if he would change anything in the way he expressed his opinion that led to the uproar, Lapid said he was invited to the festival as a director and he talked about a film’s subject. “I did not come to express one position or another on the conflict in Kashmir...” he said. In another interview to Israel’s news website Ynet, Lapid said at the IFFI stage India’s Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting Anurag Thakur and Israel’s ambassador discussed “fighting a similar enemy and [being] in a bad neighbourhood”. In response to Lapid’s claims, ambassador Gilon on Tuesday shared an open letter on Twitter calling out the filmmaker for misquoting him. “I understand your need in retrospect to ‘justify’ your behaviour but I can’t understand why you told [Israeli] Ynet afterwards that the minister and I said on stage that there is similarity between our countries because ‘we fight a similar enemy and reside in a bad neighbourhood’,” Gilon said. In the interview to Ynet, Lapid also said he shared his views at the closing ceremony with a lot of “discomfort and apprehension”. “I knew that this was an event that is terribly connected to the country, and everyone stands there and praises the government. It is not an easy position, because you are a guest. “I am the president of the jury here, you are treated very nicely. And then you come and attack the festival. There was apprehension, and there was discomfort,” he said. In countries that are increasingly losing the ability to speak the truth, “someone needs to speak up”, he said. “When I saw this movie, I couldn’t help but imagine its Israeli equivalent, which doesn’t exist but could definitely exist. So I felt I had to, because I come from a place that is itself not reformed, and is itself headed this way,” Lapid added. Jiang Zemin obituary: President who shepherded China’s economic reforms, growth Former Chinese leader [Jiang Zemin, who led China during a decade of extraordinary economic growth, passed away]( in Shanghai on November 30, aged 96. Jiang’s death comes at an extraordinary time for Chinese politics, and days after protests in many Chinese cities on a scale not seen since 1989, a year when the death of a pro-reform leader, Hu Yaobang, catalysed a pro-democracy student moment. For many in China, the decade until 2002 under Jiang and former Premier Zhu Rongji is still remembered as an era of relative openness and of unprecedented economic opportunity. Jiang took over amid the chaos of 1989 and the brutal crackdown of the pro-democracy movement, handpicked by then leader Deng Xiaoping as the man to guide China out of a sensitive moment. His biggest legacy will be his shepherding of China’s economic reforms and growth. The economy grew five-fold during this time, from $347 billion in 1989 to $1.47 trillion in 2002. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 were two landmark moments of the Jiang era. “This period is sometimes treated as an interregnum between two really tall leaders, Deng Xiaoping on the one hand and Xi Jinping on the other, who dominate the landscape, but these were in fact the most productive years of Communist China’s history,” Vijay Gokhale, former Foreign Secretary, envoy to China, and author of “After Tiananmen: The Rise of China”, told The Hindu. “This was in no small measure due to the leadership of the people who ruled China at the time — Jiang, Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,” he said. “We cannot understand China’s great power ambitions if we don’t understand this period when they laid all the building blocks for it, whether the modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army, a multidimensional foreign policy, attracting Foreign Direct Investment into China, or technology leapfrogging.” If the Jiang period saw a transformation of China’s place in the world — and marked both its rise as a global trading superpower and a period of extraordinary dependency between China and the West — his biggest legacy at home was reshaping Chinese politics to the needs of the economic reform era. Jiang worked to overcome the political opposition to Communist China’s embrace of capitalism, captured in his official ideology which is called the “Three Represents” and was added to the Party Constitution. It stated that the Party would not only represent workers, farmers and Communists, but also all of China’s “advanced productive forces”, cultural elements, and the “fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people”. It paved the way for businesspeople and entrepreneurs to join the Party’s ranks and to de-emphasise the role of ideology in the party, a trend that carried on in the Hu Jintao era. The current leader, Xi, has in the eyes of many observers in Beijing reversed that trend by once again reemphasising the centrality of the Party. The retreat of the Party from the lives of people saw an era of relative openness, although Jiang, like his predecessor Deng, cracked down on any and all spaces that were seen as challenging its rule, such as the once popular Falun Gong movement which was crushed under a nationwide crackdown in 1999. Jiang, who retired in 2002, remained influential behind the scenes in the Hu Jintao years, with many of his political appointees occupying top Party positions. More recently, following Xi’s coming to power in 2012, he stayed out of the public spotlight, largely due to ill health. State media reported he passed away due to leukemia and multiple organ failure. In recent years, Jiang garnered somewhat of a cult status for some on Chinese social media, remembered as the last of charismatic and relatively open leaders, and a contrast to his successors. He often broke into song or English, and memorably conducted an orchestra in the presence of Bill Clinton, a video that went viral on social media after his passing. His death could not have come at a more sensitive time for China’s current leader, Xi, who has in recent days been confronting the biggest challenge to his rule with protests against lockdowns and the “zero-Covid” policy over the weekend. Chinese cities have this week seen a stepped up deployment of police to thwart further protests and public gatherings, as well as increased online censorship. As online tributes to Jiang flooded social media on November 30, the leadership now faces a delicate task of organising a state tribute to bid farewell to the leader at a heated political moment in China. In Brief: The [U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation Tuesday to protect same-sex marriages]( an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalised gay marriage nationwide. The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 on Tuesday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.” Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress. The legislation now moves to the House for a final vote. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. 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