Cyclone 'Titli' makes landfall near Odisha's Gopalpur

Agencies
October 11, 2018

Bhubaneswar, Oct 11: The very severe cyclone 'Titli' makes landfall on early Thursday with surface wind reaching speeds of 126 kmph at Gopalpur in Odisha's Ganjam district, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.

"The process of landfall has started and it will completely cross the Odisha coast in one or two hours. The system will pass close to Gopalpur," H R Biswas, Director of Meteorological Centre, Bhubaneswar, told PTI.

The IMD said, "The forward sector of the eye of the storm has been entering into the land mass."

While Gopalpur in Odisha reported surface winds at 126 kmph, Kalingapatanam in Andhra Pradesh recorded wind speed of 56 kmph.

As the landfall process started, at least five districts like Ganjam, Gajapati, Puri, Khurda and Jagatsinghpur are receiving good amount of rainfall coupled with high speed winds under the impact of Titli.

Biswas said the very severe cyclonic storm (VSCS), 'Titli', is being monitored by the coastal Doppler Weather Radars at Visakhapatnam, Gopalpur and Paradip.

The latest observations indicate that 'Titli', over west-central Bay of Bengal moved north-northwestwards with a speed of about 19 kmph during the past six hours.

After the landfall, the system is very likely to re-curve gradually northeastwards, move towards Gangetic West Bengal across Odisha and weaken gradually.

Reports of trees, electric poles getting uprooted and damages to kuchha houses were reported, officials said, adding that road communication in some places, including Gopalpur and Berhampur, was snapped.

Meanwhile, the Odisha government has geared up its machinery to tackle the situation. The state government has already evacuated over 3 lakh people living in low lying areas and kuchha houses ahead of the landfall in five coastal districts.

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News Network
April 16,2020

Kochi, Apr 16: As many as 268 British citizens stranded in Kerala due to the nationwide lockdown were airlifted by British Airways on Wednesday from Thiruvananthapuram and Cochin International Airports.

The flight took off from Thiruvananthapuram to London's Heathrow Airport with 110 passengers at 7.30 pm. Later, 158 more passengers boarded the flight from Cochin airport at 10.07 pm.
A medical team, including four doctors, screened the passengers at the Thiruvananthapuram airport before they boarded the flight.

Earlier this month, the first charter flight from India reached London's Stansted with 317 British nationals on board from Goa.

The British government had earlier announced the operation of 19 chartered flights to evacuate its nationals who are stranded in India amid travel restrictions owing to the coronavirus crisis.

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News Network
January 9,2020

New Delhi, Jan 9: The Union government has removed the central security cover of Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister O Paneerselvam and DMK leader M K Stalin, officials said on Thursday.

They said while Paneerselvam had a smaller 'Y+' cover of central paramilitary commandos, Stalin had a larger 'Z+' protection.

The security cover of these two politicians has been taken off from the central security list after a threat assessment review was made by central security agencies and approved by the Union home ministry, they said.

Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) commandos were protecting these two leaders of Tamil Nadu.

However, they said, the central security cover will be formally taken off after the state police takes over their security task, they added.

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News Network
June 2,2020

London/Milan, Jun 2: World Health Organization experts and a range of other scientists said on Monday there was no evidence to support an assertion by a high profile Italian doctor that the coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic has been losing potency.

Professor Alberto Zangrillo, head of intensive care at Italy's San Raffaele Hospital in Lombardy, which bore the brunt of Italy's COVID-19 epidemic, on Sunday told state television that the new coronavirus "clinically no longer exists".

But WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, as well as several other experts on viruses and infectious diseases, said Zangrillo's comments were not supported by scientific evidence.

There is no data to show the new coronavirus is changing significantly, either in its form of transmission or in the severity of the disease it causes, they said.

"In terms of transmissibility, that has not changed, in terms of severity, that has not changed," Van Kerkhove told reporters.

It is not unusual for viruses to mutate and adapt as they spread, and the debate on Monday highlights how scientists are monitoring and tracking the new virus. The COVID-19 pandemic has so far killed more than 370,000 people and infected more than 6 million.

Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said major studies looking at genetic changes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 did not support the idea that it was becoming less potent, or weakening in any way.

"With data from more than 35,000 whole virus genomes, there is currently no evidence that there is any significant difference relating to severity," he said in an emailed comment.

Zangrillo, well known in Italy as the personal doctor of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said his comments were backed up by a study conducted by a fellow scientist, Massimo Clementi, which Zangrillo said would be published next week.

Zangrillo told Reuters: "We have never said that the virus has changed, we said that the interaction between the virus and the host has definitely changed."

He said this could be due either to different characteristics of the virus, which he said they had not yet identified, or different characteristics in those infected.

The study by Clementi, who is director of the microbiology and virology laboratory of San Raffaele, compared virus samples from COVID-19 patients at the Milan-based hospital in March with samples from patients with the disease in May.

"The result was unambiguous: an extremely significant difference between the viral load of patients admitted in March compared to" those admitted last month, Zangrillo said.

Oscar MacLean, an expert at the University of Glasgow's Centre for Virus Research, said suggestions that the virus was weakening were "not supported by anything in the scientific literature and also seem fairly implausible on genetic grounds."

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