NEWS

To ensure "transparency, fairness and absolute impartiality in the probe, the Supreme Court on Wednesday appointed former Punjab and Haryana High Court judge Justice Rakesh Kumar Jain to monitor the ongoing investigation into the deaths and violence that took place in Lakhimpur Kheri on October 3.

A Bench led by Chief Justice NV Ramana also asked the Uttar Pradesh government to include three senior IPS officers - SB Shirodkar, Deepinder Singh and Padmaja Chauhan - as the Special Investigation Team (SIT) "predominantly comprises of middle level/sub-ordinate level police officers posted in district Lakhimpur Kheri".

Centre and the Union Territory of Ladakh on Tuesday resolved all contentious issues for setting up of a 10 GegaWatt Renewable Energy Project in Leh—the largest renewable Energy project in the Himalayan region.

Centre had specially called a meeting of all the stakeholders to sort out the issues for setting up of 10 GW power project in Pang area and discuss transmission system along with battery energy storage system to ensure round the clock power supply to the region, said a senior officer of the Power Ministry

“In the meeting the UT of Ladakh agreed to immediately provide 20,000 acres of land at Pang for setting up of Renewable Energy Park and also explore the possibility of giving another 20,000 acres in near future based on the inputs provided by the SECI, said a senior officer of the Power Ministry.

Conceding the ‘oversight’ behind omission of ‘foreign secretary’ from the list of senior bureaucrats with extendable tenures who figure in Fundamental Rules, 1922 as amended on Monday, the government on Wednesday issued a corrigendum restoring the post of foreign secretary in the amended rule.

Rule 56(d) of Fundamental Rules, 1922 – prior to Monday’s amendment – pertained to top functionaries like home secretary, defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the chiefs of Intelligence Bureau and RAW, whose tenures could be extended by the government up to a maximum of two years and beyond as specified. The amended Rule 56(d), while adding the directors of ED and CBI to this list, curiously left out foreign secretary.

People should take an antibody test to see whether they need a COVID-19 booster shot, some experts have said.

These experts, including epidemiologists and virologists, can't agree on whether everybody should take the test, or only specific groups who are more at risk from COVID-19 — but they agree that knowing antibody levels could help decide whether somebody needs a booster shot.

Dorry Segev, professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in The Hill in October that it was "time to check antibodies and take the the guesswork out this pandemic."

We should test people for COVID-19 antibodies and recommend boosters when levels fall below a threshold, instead of assuming "one size fits all," he wrote. Antibody levels can determine how quickly you react to the coronavirus, and killing the virus quicker could both make infections less severe and limit the spread from person to person, he wrote.