Morning digest: NASA's Perseverance rover makes historic Mars landing; raising issues of Kashmir and status of minorities ‘deplorable’, India tells U.N., and more

The spacecraft's self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed "the seven minutes of terror" stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight. The primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the planet was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.