Some parts of India are grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high in excess of 270 gigawatts, spurring a government call for consumers to limit use.

An El Nino weather pattern is bringing above-average summer temperatures across the subcontinent in May, with nighttime outages running from 40 minutes to an hour in the manufacturing and infotech hub of Chennai, residents said.

“South Chennai has seen frequent power cuts over the past two days, with outages at short intervals,” said R Hari, a resident of the southern city, who complained that they made it difficult to work from home.

India’s peak power deficit late on Thursday evening was about 2.57 gigawatts, said national regulator Grid-India.

“Although we are prepared to supply electricity as required, due to the intense summer, let us all try to use electricity wisely and judiciously,” the power ministry said in a statement on Friday.

Shortages are chronic during the evening hours as supply then relies heavily on thermal and hydropower sources, while daytime demand is met partly by solar generation.

The record heat and surging electricity demand are testing India’s power system, said Disha Aggarwal, senior programme lead at energy and environment think-tank CEEW, as hotter nights become the norm.

India needs to urgently fast-track commissioning of battery storage to make use of surplus solar energy at night, she added.

From Friday to May 27, weather authorities have forecast “heatwave to severe heatwave conditions” for the capital New Delhi, along with large northern and eastern areas.

Several people in New Delhi and the neighbouring city of Noida took to X to complain of power outages during the night.

In the eastern coastal state of Odisha, some users have protested against longer power cuts in some areas during both day and night, residents and media said.

• Over 2,000 mourners honour men killed defending mosque.
• FBI investigates attack as suspected hate crime.
• Mourners call for end to anti-Muslim hatred.
  

SAN DIEGO: More than 2,000 people gathered in a San Diego park on Thursday to mourn a security guard and two other men murdered as they tried to stop this week’s attack on the city’s largest mosque.

Men and women, including police officers in uniform, stood in rows for the funeral prayer, or Janazah, to remember the three men referred to as heroes by mourners for delaying and distracting the attackers, preventing further bloodshed at a time when children were at the mosque’s school.

The bodies of the men, Amin Abdullah, 51, Mansour Kaziha, 78, and Nadir Awad, 57, lay beneath cloths and rugs, underneath a white canopy.

“[Allahu Akbar] God is the ⁠greatest,” the mourners chanted in Arabic, raising their hands at the service in a park wedged between the city’s river and a soccer stadium.

The three men were set to be buried alongside one another later in the day at a nearby cemetery.

“Today is a message to everyone. Our community got hurt but our community is standing strong and firm,” said the centre’s imam, Taha Hassane, adding that people had travelled from the eastern United States and across California for the service.

The FBI is investigating the attack as a suspected hate crime, and the killings have put Muslims across the United States on edge at a time of rising Islamophobia.

Mourner Ruba Abu Jamah, who knew all three men, called for an end to the hatred of Muslims that she believed inspired the attackers. She questioned why the mother of one of the ⁠teenage suspects, who alerted police that her son was suicidal, allegedly allowed him to have access to guns.

“For God’s sake, why are we going backwards? Hate takes us backwards,” said Abu Jamah, after hearses took the men’s bodies for burial. “Moms, don’t have a whole display of weapons if you know your 16-year-old kid is depressed.”

Abdullah was shot dead in a gun battle with the teenage assailants during which he used his radio to call in a lockdown procedure, ⁠police said.

Kaziha, the centre’s handyman and cook, as well as Awad, whose wife is a teacher at the centre and who lived across the street from the mosque, were shot dead by the attackers after they heard gunfire and ran towards the centre.

Abdullah’s actions are credited with delaying the assailants’ entry to ⁠the centre, where 140 students hid in closets and other spaces, police said.

The assailants fled the mosque in their vehicle and were later found dead in the car from self-inflicted gunshots, police said.

Khaled Abdullah, 24, the security guard’s son, said his family has drawn strength from the ⁠way his father died.

“The fact that he was on the front line, trying to defend kids and innocent people, that makes me feel good,” Khaled told Reuters on Wednesday. “Calling him a hero is the least we can do.”

A French appeals court found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter on Thursday over the Rio-Paris plane crash, but a 17-year legal battle over the country’s worst aviation disaster is set to continue.

“Justice has absolutely been done,” Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, whose son was one of 228 people who died in the crash, said outside the courtroom.

Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 plunged in pitch darkness into the Atlantic during an equatorial storm on June 1, 2009, listened to the verdict in silence.

A lower court had in 2023 cleared the two French companies, both of which have repeatedly denied the charges.

Thursday’s verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving relatives of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims and two of France’s most emblematic companies.

The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, €225,000 ($261,720), following the request of prosecutors during last year’s eight-week trial.

The fines, amounting to just a few minutes of either company’s revenue, have been widely dismissed as a token penalty but families said corporate reputations were on the line.

Airbus and Air France both said they would appeal to France’s highest court, ignoring pleas from the relatives.

“There is no human, moral or legal justification in continuing this procedure,” said Lamy, who appealed to both companies to stop what she called “procedural harassment”.

Divisions over crash cause

Lawyers had predicted further appeals on legal points and warned these could potentially drag the process out for years.

Families’ lawyer Alain Jakubowicz told Reuters a second full re-trial, rehashing the evidence a third time, could not be ruled out if the Court of Cassation faulted Thursday’s verdict.

Relatives and lawyers sat in a high-windowed courtroom that has witnessed some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read out a list of victims, many sharing the same family names.

The black boxes from Flight 447 were retrieved in 2011, after a two-year deep-sea search that was almost called off.

The trial exposed bitter divisions between the airline and planemaker over the cause of the accident and a gulf between a civil crash report that focused mainly on the actions of pilots and a wider chain of cause and effect highlighted by the court.

Analysts said the ruling was unlikely to alter regulators’ views on the crash, which did not lead to major technical changes. France’s BEA crash investigators found the plane’s crew had pushed their jet into a stall, chopping lift from under the wings, after mishandling a problem to do with iced-up sensors.

Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures inside both the planemaker and airline. Those included poor training and failing to follow up on earlier sensor flaws.

To prove manslaughter, prosecutors had to not only establish negligence but also pull the threads together to demonstrate how this caused the crash. Their failure to make that part of the argument stick had resulted in the earlier acquittal.

Lamy said the deceased pilots had been “rehabilitated”.