In one of the biggest donations by a business family in India, the family of Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani on Thursday committed to donating Rs 60,000 crore (around $7.7 billion) to various charities related to health care, education, and skill development. The commitment has been made to mark Gautam Adani's 60th birthday on Friday as well as the birth centenary year of his father Shantilal Adani. The corpus will be administered by the Adani Foundation. "At a very fundamental level, [programmes] related to all these three areas should be seen holistically and they collectively form the drivers to build an equitable and future-ready India.
The experts said there is a need to relook at the testing strategy in a way that it results in guiding the public health response and effectively limiting the spread of the disease.
"God willing, it's going to save a lot of lives," Biden said at the White House as he finished signing the bill.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a media briefing that "the Indian side should fully recognise the anti-China separatist nature of the 14th Dalai Lama."
Stressing on the need to protect both lives and livelihoods, he said public health action in India and across the world must be continually guided by evidence from four key questions -- how transmissible is the variant, severity of the disease it causes, how well vaccines and prior SARS-CoV-2 infection protect and how common people perceive risk and follow control measures.
In a letter to states and union territories, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan has suggested setting up of a state steering committee chaired by the chief secretary, a state task force led by additional Chief Secretary or principal secretary (health), and a district task force to be headed by the district magistrate.
The Karnataka cabinet on Thursday decided to promulgate an ordinance to give effect to the contentious law against religious conversions.
The two cities finally got their act together by ramping up the testing capacity and implementing stricter quarantine norms.
Dharavi's success underlines the importance of community participation in any public health crisis.
Drishti, an affordable eye care chain has lit up the lives of scores of people in rural areas.
"The unfair and discriminatory" rules have drawn sharp criticism from the Indian Olympic Association, which has written to the Games' organising committee requesting it to ensure that mechanisms to prevent COVID-19 do not have any "adverse and detrimental impact" on performance of athletes.
The study, published in Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that the risk to vaccinated people was lower when unvaccinated mixed with unvaccinated.
The Asian Development Bank has approved a US$ 1.5 billion (around Rs 11,185 crore) loan to India for COVID-19 vaccine procurement.
'The BJP is trying to change this mantra.'
Twelve months on and things have not got any easier for Tennis Australia with Omicron spreading through the country just as the first players are set to arrive for warm-up events ahead of the Melbourne Park tournament.
A purported video of the incident showing the mob beating the women up mercilessly on Wednesday was shared in the social media by Amit Malviya, the head of BJP's IT cell on Saturday.
'By the time actual action began, it was already too late.' 'The virus was raging.'
Stressing that the Covid virus may continue to transmit for a "very long time", senior WHO official Poonam Khetrapal Singh says the level of immunity in a community, through vaccination and previous infection, will determine whether it will become endemic in the long run.
Mental health coach Anu Krishna offers advice on how parents and students can overcome the stress caused by online education.
'What the government should do is to use the vaccine judiciously, not just to prevent a third wave alone, but to stop the number of deaths happening in the interim.'
The WHO has countries to enhance surveillance and sequencing efforts to better understand circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants, submit complete genome sequences and associated metadata to a publicly available database.
The research on 1,276 patients from Wuhan, China, shows that around one in three people still experienced shortness of breath after 12 months, while lung impairments persisted in some patients, especially those who had experienced the most severe illness with Covid-19.
'The government should immediately enact an Act to make caste discrimination a criminal offence and lay down a procedure similar to that of the Anti-Ragging Act.' 'Ragging has nearly been eliminated because it is treated as a criminal offence.' 'Similar procedure should be used in case of caste discrimination.'
'We behaved as if this disease is not a problem for India.' 'We acted as if it would go away. But it didn't go away; it exploded.'
'Since the Covid virus has a tendency to mutate, we can continue to expect new variants of the virus to emerge and keep circulating and recirculating in the communities.'
rediffGURU Anu Krishna, a mental health coach and NLP practitioner, offers expert advice on how to take charge of your life.
The reason is that because of the hybrid immunity after three waves of natural infection and a large proportion of adults receiving both doses of COVID-19 vaccine, the susceptible pool has come down drastically, Lahariya said.
The gunman entered the Greenwood Park Mall with a rifle and several magazines of ammunition and began firing in the food court.
As the COVID wave gradually shifts to rural areas, several states are gearing up to check its spread through self-proclaimed lockdowns by Panchayati Raj institutions, creating a database of migrants and providing free online medical consultation to the sick.
The political war of words over Manipur intensified on Saturday with the BJP raising the incidents of atrocities against women in West Bengal and Rajasthan and questioning the 'silence' of the opposition, which termed it as a diversionary tactic to avoid debate on the situation in the north-eastern state.
'The prime minister is talking to his Chachaji and he is crying in the PM's lap, it was such an emotional scene.'
The government's focus is on urban areas, so rural areas are neglected and the COVID situation in Bihar's villages -- neither the positive cases nor the deaths -- are reported, notes M I Khan.
From offering office premises that can be converted into isolation wards to earmarking funds to be used for procuring kits, ventilators as well as personal protective equipment for health care workers, India Inc has put a united front to combat the unprecedented crisis facing the country.
Iconic composer Ilaiyaraaja, celebrated athlete PT Usha, philanthropist Veerendra Heggade and screenwriter V Vijayendra Prasad Garu were nominated to Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.
Spain's Paula Badosa, the women's world number 67, was the only player to contract the coronavirus. She was released from hotel quarantine on Wednesday.
Naqvi expressed confidence that Muslims will abide by lockdown guidelines during the holy month of Ramzan.
The private college and hospital has been in the thick of controversy following irregularities and fraud, raising questions on why the Chhattisgarh government wants to acquire the debt-ridden institution by paying double the amount of its valuation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday met prominent US personalities from different walks of life, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk who asserted that India has more promise than any other large country and that he is incredibly excited about its future.
We have the highest suicide rate among 10 Southeast Asian countries.
Less than 30,000 booster doses daily in December.
