New Delhi, Jul 18: Textiles Minister Smriti Irani was today given the additional charge of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry after M Venkaiah Naidu resigned from the Cabinet to contest the vice-presidential poll.
The portfolio of urban development, which too was with Naidu, was given to Narendra Singh Tomar, Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, the PMO said.
The BJP had yesterday decided to field Naidu as NDA's candidate for the post of vice president.
New Delhi, Jun 10: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday brought back over 2,300 kg of polished diamonds and pearls worth Rs 1,350 crore of firms belonging to Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi from Hong Kong, officials said.
Out of the 108 consignments that landed at Mumbai, 32 belong to overseas entities "controlled" by Modi while the rest are of Mehul Choksi firms.
Both the businessmen are being probed by the ED under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in connection with an over USD 2 billion alleged bank fraud at a PNB branch in Mumbai.
The valuables include polished diamonds, pearls and silver jewellery, and is worth Rs 1,350 crore.
The ED completed "all legal formalities" with authorities in Hong Kong to bring back these valuables, the agency said.
These will formally seized under the PMLA now, it said.
Kozhikode, Aug 8: A tailwind or crosswind could be the reason for the Air India Express flight mishap at Kozhikode international airport in Kerala, according to some aviation experts.
Team of DGCA and AIE already reached the spot. With the death of the captain and co-pilot in the mishap, the investigation would be focusing mainly on the voice recorders and other technical aspects.
It is learnt that the ill-fated aircraft, IX 1344 with 190 onboard including crew, was initially planning to land on runway-28 of the airport. But later the pilot opted runway-10 which is toward the other direction. Pilots would be taking the decisions on the basis of inputs from ATC.
The questions now doing the rounds are what made the pilot opt runway-10 and whether the tabletop runway lacked adequate safety parameters.
An aviation expert, who didn't want to be quoted, said that Capt Deepak Sathe, who was commandeering the aircraft, was a well-experienced pilot and was also familiar with the terrains. Hence the chances of any error from his part was very unlikely. Hence a fair in-depth probe was required to find the exact cause.
Though the Kozhikode airport has an Instrument Landing System, it was of category-I for which pilot's visibility is very crucial toward a touchdown. Since it is a tabletop airport and rough weather prevailing in the region, the chances of tailwind was also high, said sources.
There had been safety concerns about the airport over quite some time. In 2011 aviation safety consultant captain Mohan Ranganathan reportedly gave a report citing the safety issues, especially the buffer zones at the end of the runway.
However, an AAI officer said that rectification steps were already done by last year by widening the Runway End Safety Area (RESA) from 90 metre to 240 metre. However, the length of the runway had to be reduced to 2,700 metre from 2,850. The AAI was also constantly pressing for increasing the runway length to 3,150 metres. But that was getting delayed due to land acquisition issues pending with the state government.
Mumbai, Jul 13: In a significant landmark, the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has achieved a doubling-rate of 50 days for COVID-19 cases, a top official said on Monday.
This was possible because of the civic body's 'open testing policy', implying tests without prescriptions, making it the only city in the country to implement it.
"After the open testing policy, our testing has gone up from 4,000 to 6,800, daily. But the total positive cases have come down from 1,400 to 1,200 now," BMC Municipal Commissioner I.S. Chahal told IANS.
Of these 1,200 positive cases, the symptomatic cases are less than 200, so the BMC needs only 200 beds daily, the civic chief said.
Even the BMC's discharge rate now stands at 70 percent, and on Sunday, after allotting beds to all patients, there were still 7,000 COVID beds plus 250 ICU beds lying vacant, said Chahal.
For this achievement, Chahal gave the credit to the entire 'Team BMC' where - despite losing a little over 100 officials to the virus - civic officials and other Corona warriors are engaged 24x7 in controlling the pandemic for over four months.
Since the first case was detected in Mumbai on March 11 (after the state's first infectees in Pune on March 9) and the state's first death notched in Mumbai on March 17, the current Maharashtra Covid-19 tally stands at 2,54,427 cases and fatalities at 10,289, while Mumbai has recorded 92,988 cases with a death toll of 5,288.
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We better prepare another list of those who got killed by saffron terrorists and send it to President of India.
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