Appeal

In law, an appeal is the process in which cases are reviewed, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of clarifying and interpreting law. Although appellate courts have existed for thousands of years, common law countries did not incorporate an affirmative right to appeal into their jurisprudence until the nineteenth century.

History

Appellate courts and other systems of error correction have existed for millennia. During the first dynasty of Babylon, Hammurabi and his governors served as the highest appellate courts of the land.Ancient Roman law employed a complex hierarchy of appellate courts, where some appeals would be heard by the emperor. Additionally, appellate courts have existed in Japan since at least the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1333 CE). During this time, the Shogunate established hikitsuke, a high appellate court to aid the state in adjudicating lawsuits. In the Eighteenth century, William Blackstone observed in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that appeals existed as a form of error correction in the common law during the reign of Edward III of England.

Hurricane Dean

Hurricane Dean was the strongest tropical cyclone of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the most intense North Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Wilma of 2005, tying for seventh overall. Additionally, it made the third most intense Atlantic hurricane landfall. A Cape Verde-type hurricane that formed on August 13, 2007, Dean took a west-northwest path from the eastern Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lucia Channel and into the Caribbean. It strengthened into a major hurricane, reaching Category 5 status on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale before passing just south of Jamaica on August 20. The storm made landfall on the Yucatán Peninsula on August 21 as a powerful Category 5 storm. It crossed the peninsula and emerged into the Bay of Campeche weakened, but still a hurricane. It strengthened briefly before making a second landfall near Tecolutla in the Mexican state of Veracruz on August 22. Dean drifted to the northwest, weakening into a remnant low which dissipated uneventfully over the southwestern United States.

Narendra Modi

Narendra Damodardas Modi (Gujarati: [nəreːnd̪rə d̪ɑːmoːd̪ərəd̪ɑːs moːd̪iː], born 17 September 1950) is the 15th and current Prime Minister of India, in office since 26 May 2014. Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament (MP) from Varanasi. He led the BJP in the 2014 general election, which gave the party a majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian parliament) – a first for any party since 1984 – and was credited for 2014 BJP electoral victories in the states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir.

Since taking office as Prime Minister, Modi's administration has focused on reforming and modernising India's infrastructure and government, reducing bureaucracy, encouraging increased foreign direct investment, improving national standards of health and sanitation and improving foreign relations. Modi has been appreciated for starting initiatives like Swachh Bharat Mission, Make in India and Digital India. Earlier, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi's economic policies (credited with encouraging economic growth in Gujarat) have been praised, although his administration has also been criticised for failing to significantly improve the human development in the state and failing to prevent the 2002 Gujarat riots. A Hindu nationalist and a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Modi remains a controversial figure domestically and internationally, despite his progressivism. Known for his tech savvy image, he is the second most followed politician on social media after U.S. President Barack Obama.