The Daily Catch-Up: Ram Temple case in Supreme Court and other top stories

A dry June, and a drenched Northeast
June 2026 is on course to be one of the driest on record since 1901, running a rainfall deficit of more than 43% nationally. Weak monsoon winds and the absence of the usual pre-monsoon cyclones are largely to blame. The Northeast, however, tells a different story. In Arunachal Pradesh, flash floods and landslides have killed at least three people; a rescue boat capsized mid-operation, leaving rescuers in need of rescuing. Assam has had a railway bridge washed out, with 16,000 people affected in Dhemaji district alone.

Europe’s heatwave turns lethal
A record-breaking heatwave has pushed France’s excess death toll past 1,000 in just three days, with health officials warning that figure will rise as deaths in private homes and care facilities are tallied. The WHO notes that Europe is now warming at twice the global average rate 2014 a pattern that makes the phrase ‘once-in-a-generation’ heatwave increasingly difficult to defend. Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic all broke national temperature records within days of each other; Poland’s 1921 record fell to 40.5 C on Sunday.
Read more → France sees 1,000 excess deaths as Europe’s record heatwave turns deadlier

Spill The Expresso

HEALTH: An egg-harvesting racket, and a law that existed only on paper
Indian law permits a woman to donate eggs once in her lifetime. In practice, a racket spanning multiple states was making a mockery of that limit. Women in financial difficulty were recruited to donate eggs repeatedly — in some cases 35 or 45 times — enabled by forged Aadhaar cards. Each cycle paid Rs 20,000 to 35,000 to the donor; intended parents were charged in lakhs; agents kept the difference. The case, now before Maharashtra authorities, raises uncomfortable questions about who the law is actually designed to protect.

ENTERTAINMENT: Lock Upp returns, and arrives with disclosures
Akanksha Chamola used the premiere of Lock Upp: Sach Ya Sazaa to confirm what viewers had speculated: she is headed for divorce from Anupama actor Gaurav Khanna, and the two have lived apart for over a year. Elsewhere on the show, Sunita Ahuja — wife of Govinda — required medical attention after a paintball hit. The prize on offer is Rs 1 crore. Reality television, doing what reality television does.

TECHNOLOGY: Netflix is asking every profile to have its own email address
Since June 15, Netflix has been rolling out a requirement that every profile on an account log in with a unique email address. The move, which the company has not accompanied by a detailed explanation, effectively extends its crackdown on password-sharing to shared accounts within a household. Child profiles are exempt, for now.

Must Read

A grocer, a bottle of rat poison, and eight deaths in Chhattisgarh
Over five months, eight people in the village of Kharve in Chhattisgarh died after sharing a drink with the same man — the local grocer, Ramsahay Jaiswal. For a while, the village concluded it was a curse, consulting priests and traditional healers. It was not a curse. Each of the eight, it emerged, had crossed Jaiswal at some point — a property dispute here, an unpaid loan there, slights so old that most people had forgotten them. Jaiswal had not.

112 years since a single moment changed everything
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Within a month, a chain of alliances and ultimatums had pulled the major powers of Europe into a war that would claim approximately 15 million lives. The anniversary is a reminder that large consequences do not always announce themselves with large causes.

Book Nook

Umar Khalid’s history of the Ho community
Fractured Communities, by the jailed activist and scholar Umar Khalid, examines the Ho community of Jharkhand’s Singhbhum region and argues that Adivasi politics has long been misread — romanticised, simplified, and co-opted. Reviewing it in The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls it free of the exoticism that has plagued the field, and an “extraordinary achievement for a PhD dissertation.” The book has attracted attention both for what it says and for who wrote it.

News at a Glance

No tax break for strong hybrids, no petrol bikes in Delhi from April 2028
Bihar governor, MoS External Affairs to represent India at Khamenei funeral
Why DMK has hit the streets over TVK minister’s two-year-old video
Sanjaya Baru writes: It’s time to resume the India-China strategic economic dialogue
Echoes from UP in wake of NEET protests: ‘We are kattar BJP, but…’
AI infrastructure bets outshine weak Indian stock markets in 2026
Ladakh shows the way: Let’s switch off the lights, bring back the starry night

Still not done? Here’s more from the day.

CBSE issues three-language policy guidelines — with significant carve-outs
Weeks after a CBSE mandate requiring students to study two native Indian languages sparked a parental revolt and a rush of court petitions, the board has issued revised guidelines. The entire current Class 10 batch is exempted; Classes 7 to 9 get transitional relief. The policy will apply in full only to students entering Class 6 from the next academic session.

Death penalty in Pune’s Nasrapur case — in 60 days
A Pune special court sentenced a 65-year-old man to death for the rape and murder of a three-year-old girl in Nasrapur village — just two months after the crime. The judge categorised it as a “rarest of rare” case. The verdict, delivered within 60 days of the offence, is among the fastest capital sentences in recent Indian legal history.

A family reversed on a live expressway. Four of them did not survive.
CCTV footage from the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway near Saharanpur, now widely circulating, shows the moment a Tata Tiago — reversing after its driver missed a junction — was struck by a speeding Scorpio SUV. Four members of the same family were killed, including a nine-year-old boy. The footage has renewed a familiar, unresolved debate about enforcement on India’s high-speed road network.

A Kerala family vanished on moving day. All four were found in the river.
A family of four — evicted from their rented home after months of financial difficulty — disappeared on the morning officials arrived to help them move to a new residence. Their bodies were recovered from the Muvattupuzha river over the following three days, with six-year-old Anna the last to be found. Police suspect suicide; investigations continue.

Pakistan strikes inside Afghanistan after Karachi Rangers attack
Pakistan’s military launched airstrikes and a ground operation targeting militant hideouts in three eastern Afghan provinces, hours after militants stormed the paramilitary Rangers headquarters in Karachi, killing three soldiers. Islamabad says 29 fighters were killed; Afghan authorities say the strikes hit civilian areas, putting the civilian death toll at more than 35. The strikes mark the latest escalation in a cycle of cross-border military action that has resisted several rounds of internationally mediated talks.

US and Iran agree to stand down — for now
After a weekend of renewed exchanges — US strikes on Iranian military sites, Iranian retaliation in Kuwait and Bahrain — both sides have agreed to halt operations and meet in Doha on Tuesday. The 11-day-old ceasefire, already strained by competing interpretations of a memorandum of understanding on the Strait of Hormuz, survived the weekend, though only just. President Trump has continued to warn that the US could “complete the job” if hostilities resume.

Venezuela’s earthquake death toll approaches 1,500
Days after twin earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck northwestern Venezuela, the official death toll has neared 1,500, with several others injured and tens of thousands missing. Rescue teams from the US, Mexico, El Salvador and several European countries are on the ground, but the search is being hampered by aftershocks, damaged infrastructure and what critics describe as an inadequate domestic emergency response. The USGS has warned the final toll could reach into the tens of thousands.

Apple raises Mac and iPad prices by up to 20%
Apple has increased the price of nearly every Mac and iPad, with the base MacBook Air rising from $1,099 to $1,299 and the entry MacBook Pro from $1,699 to $1,999. The company attributes the increase not to tariffs but to a global shortage of memory and storage chips, driven by AI data-centre demand. DRAM contract prices have risen close to 100% this year. Apple, which had been absorbing costs until now, says it can no longer do so. It is not alone: Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and Sony have made similar moves in recent months.

Joe Biden calls Donald Trump ‘a loser’
Speaking at a Maryland Democratic gala on Saturday — exactly two years after the debate performance that ended his presidential campaign — Joe Biden delivered one of his sharpest attacks on his successor since leaving office. He singled out Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, the rebranding of the Kennedy Center, and a no-bid filtration contract awarded to a Mar-a-Lago neighbour. “What a loser,” he said. The corruption he alleged, he added, was on a scale “never seen before in American history in any administration.”

Salman Khan to leave Galaxy Apartments after 52 years
The actor has received municipal approval for a six-storey home on the same plot in Bandra, Mumbai, where Galaxy Apartments has stood for more than half a century. The building is among Bollywood’s most recognisable addresses. Whether the move marks the end of an era or simply a change of floor plan is, perhaps, a matter of perspective.

The Daily Catch-Up is published Monday to Friday by The Indian Express.