NEWS

Union Home Minister Shri Amit Shah on Monday extended his three-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir and decided to spend the night with the CRPF to listen to their grievances and understand the challenges they are facing, he said.

''People sleep peacefully because you are here at the border," Amit Shah said in an address to security personnel at the CRPF camp in Pulwama. "I want to spend one night with you people and understand your difficulties. I want to know how they feel at the last border point."

While noting that the law and order situation in the Union Territory has "improved drastically", Shah emphasised that the Modi government has a zero-tolerance policy towards terror.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan wrote to his Tamil Nadu counterpart M K Stalin, urging his government to draw maximum quantities of water from the Mullaperiyar dam as reservoir levels inched closer to the 142-foot mark after heavy rain pounded the area.

Vijayan made the appeal as water levels in the dam, situated on the banks of Periyar river in Kerala’s Idukki district but managed by Tamil Nadu, crossed 137.05 feet on Sunday night.

As countries across the world experience a spurt in Covid cases, a group of scientists of the INSACOG network monitoring genomic variations in SARS-CoV-2 contended that a new mutated form of the Covid-causing coronavirus (AY.4.2) is present in India ‘in very low numbers’.

This mutation that has caused an exponential rise in cases in Europe, Israel, and Russia in the last week is deemed to be more contagious than the Delta virus.

Scientists say the AY.4.2-related findings still carry a high level of uncertainty, and it is still early to say that this lineage carries a higher risk of severe illness or death. On October 21, the US Centers for Diseases Control said it has less than 10 reported cases of AY.4.2 in its database so far, but the UK health authorities have found 15,120 cases of AY.4.2 since it was first detected in July.

The subject of space and the solar system is vast and intriguing. Jupiter, as the largest planet, has the strongest gravitational effect of all the planetary bodies. As a result, it draws many things, such as asteroids, that travel in free space around it.

Skywatchers in Japan recently noticed what appeared to be a light in Jupiter's atmosphere produced by an asteroid collision. An analysis team headed by Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Kyoto University in Japan, observed a vibrant flash in Jupiter's atmosphere on October 15, 2021, which was apparently produced by an asteroid striking on the planet.