A two-kilometre-wide “potentially hazardous” asteroid is set to pass by Earth on Wednesday, NASA said, adding that the space rock will pose no danger to our home planet in this fly by. The asteroid, called 1998 OR2, will make its closest approach at 5.55 a.m. EDT (3.25 p.m. India time). It will get no closer than 6.3 million kilometres, passing more than 16 times farther away than the Moon, NASA said. Asteroid 1998 OR2 was discovered by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program at NASA”s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July 1998, and for the past two decades astronomers have tracked it.…
Author: Our Correspondent
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman attacked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on his allegations on “wilful defaulters, bad loans and write-offs”, calling them an attempt to “mislead people in a brazen manner” and sensationalise facts. “Wished Rahul Gandhi consulted Dr Manmohan Singh on what this writing off was about,” she said in a 13-tweet retort around 11 pm. “Rahul Gandhi, MP (LS), and Randeep Singh Surjewala, spokesperson of Congress, have attempted to mislead people in a brazen manner. Typical to Congress, they resort to sensationalising facts by taking them out of context,” Ms Sitharaman tweeted. Rahul Gandhi had attacked the ruling BJP…
Actor Irrfan Khan, who was admitted to Mumbai’s Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital with a colon infection, has died. The Piku star battled a tumour for several months and returned to Mumbai some months ago after being treated in London. Irrfan Khan is survived by his wife Sutapa and two sons. Yesterday, his spokesperson confirmed that he had been taken to the intensive care unit and later, dismissed rumours that Irrfan Khan had died. Filmmaker Shoojit Sircar, who directed Irrfan Khan in Piku, tweeted: “My dear friend Irfaan. You fought and fought and fought. I will always be proud of you..…
Two policemen were injured after a mob targeted police personnel who were trying to enforce social distancing in Howrah, near Kolkata. A huge police team has been sent to the area to restore order. The attack took place at Tikiapara as the policemen were trying to disperse crowds at a roadside market that had suddenly mushroomed. The angry crowd then threw stones at the police and chased them. The police had to flee for shelter into the Tikiapara police outpost. But the mob stoned the police outpost too. At least two police vehicles were ransacked. Howrah is a hotspot district…
On a plea by the Election Commission (EC), the Rajasthan High Court on Tuesday extended the deadline for conducting elections to Jaipur, Kota and Jodhpur municipal corporations till August 31. The state election commission moved a plea before the court by seeking an extension of the deadline for elections to the three corporations. The EC argued that it was not possible to hold the polls amid the ongoing lockdown imposed to combat the coronavirus threat. The HC bench comprising of Chief Justice Inderjeet Mahanty and Justice S K Sharma, heard the plea and extended the deadline for conducting the elections…
COVID-19 deaths cross1000-mark in India. The total number of infections topped 31,000 on Wednesday. The country recorded a total of 31,332 cases of which 22,629 are active, while 7,695 have been cured. A total of 1,007 people have died of the deadly infection. 73 people have died in the last 24 hours, recording the biggest jump in the number of deaths in a day.
India on Tuesday rejected a sharp critique by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), saying that the bipartisan American government panel’s “misrepresentation has reached new levels”. Minorities are under increasing assault in India, a bipartisan US commission mandated to monitor religious freedom globally said on Tuesday, placing it in a list of 14 nations including Pakistan, China and North Korea for the first time since 2004. Rejecting the findings of the annual report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that include particular criticism of Union Home Minister Amit Shah and the controversial Citizenship…
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has said that China cannot fulfill its agenda of global domination by passing out masks to people, ‘many of which turned out to be defective’. Thomas Friedman said, “China can only lead if it unmasks the truth about where the coronavirus came from. Did it accidentally leak from a laboratory in Wuhan or did it, most likely, come out of a wet market in China.” Thomas Friedman, who is a foreign affairs expert, said that China should have banned its wet markets after the Sars outbreak in 2003. The wet markets in China sell…
A team of police personnel were pelted with stones on Monday morning after they went to verify a report about a religious gathering in Aurangabad district. A police official has sustained minor injuries. “A team of Bidkin Police received information that 35-40 people have gathered at a mosque to offer prayers. When a police team went to verify this information, they were pelted with stones,” the district’s Superintendent of Police Mokshada Patil told PTI. Police registered a case against it and 15 people have been taken in custody. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had on Sunday appealed to the people to…
India on Tuesday, at the BRICS foreign ministers web summit amid the coronavirus pandemic, called for reform of multilateral systems and reiterated its support for multilateralism. Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar said the current challenge posed by the novel coronavirus pandemic, “underlines all the more the need for reform of multilateral systems and that reformed multilateralism was the way forward.” Though the former diplomat Jaishankar did not mention any names, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and other international organizations have drawn severe criticism over their failure to make a timely intervention to check the spread of the…