The deaths last Saturday of four soldiers and a police officer in an encounter with terrorists near Handwara town in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kupwara district, call attention to, among other things, a difficult summer ahead. It is unusual and disproportionate for just a couple of terrorists to take down five highly skilled and motivated soldiers — a Commanding Officer of a battalion in the rank of a colonel, a major, two other ranks and a special operations group policeman in the rank of a sub inspector — in a firefight. The details on offer are sketchy, yet provide compelling evidence of an operation that went horribly wrong. On Saturday afternoon, receiving intelligence that terrorists were present in a house in Changimulla village, Colonel Ashutosh Sharma of 21 Rashtriya Rifles, Major Anuj Sood, Naik Rajesh Kumar, Lance Naik Dinesh Singh and J&K Police Sub Inspector Shakeel Qazi, and possibly others reached the site which had a building and a cowshed adjoining it, and an intense
With containment strategies in place even before the first case of novel coronavirus was detected on January 30, Kerala appears to have finally hammered the curve flat. On May 1, for the first time, the State reported zero new cases, and again on two consecutive days — May 3 and May 4. Zero fresh cases on three days in May appear to be more than a blip. If in April there were early signs of Kerala gaining an upper hand over the virus, its control became clear from the fourth week of April. Since April 22, except on four days, the number of new cases reported has remained either the same or fewer than the number of recoveries. The small number of cases reported so far — 499 — demonstrates how excellent its containment efforts have been. What is more remarkable is that 462 of those infected have fully recovered, including an elderly couple, aged 93 and 88 years, and there have been just three deaths — a case fatality rate of 0.6% against the national average of 3.3%. The containment
Mini Krishnan
How little brains process the lockdown is a concern — for, a child paints an apparition as a friend as it cannot infect unlike a human being
