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Covid data (India), August 30, 2022: Vaccinations of the Day: 20,28,640; Vaccination Day Before: 24,70,330; Total Vaccination Doses: 2,11,91,05,738; Samples Tested on August 28: 1,65,751; Total Samples Tested: 88,52,08,552; Total Cases: 4,44,15,723 (New 7,591 ); Total Deaths: 5,27,799 (New 45); Deaths (State-wise - New Deaths): Delhi: 4; Maharashtra: 5 - India Travel Times.Com   [Estd: 1998]       * * *    Travel, More Travel, Travel Means A Million Things     * * *    
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An "uncertain economy" and "rapid hiring" were cited as the reasons. However, Jassy said the company will continue to hire in certain areas. The technology companies have so far retrenched 3,09,591 tech employees globally.

The Punjab Government has suspended mobile internet as a manhunt has been launched to nab “fugitive” Amritpal Singh, the Waris Punjab De leader. There are also rumours he has been caught and put behind bars in far away Assam. Of late, Khalistanis have stepped up attacks on Indian establishments in Australia, Canada, UK and the US.

The staggering amount of dead Bony Bream floating and clogging several kms of Darling river near the Menindee town is posing an environmental disaster.

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"Enough!" - In a sheer lack of sense of proportion, President Biden had reacted to yet another boy, just of 15 years, shooting dead five people in North Carolina some time ago, besides sounding like he is going to put an end to American gun violence instantly! After the latest LA episode, he is yet to react! Biden presents a brilliant comparison to Indian Chief Ministers for their stupid reactions in similar circumstances of recent months!

For sure, gun violence will continue as long as the gun is there! Primarily meant for self-defence, how many times - or what percentage of all firings - it has successfully defended the carriers and saved lives and how? Has there been a survey?

Cricketer Rishabh Pant had an attack of sleep at the wheel. The situation of a sudden attack of sleep during travel is not a sleep disorder like narcolepsy but a common occurrence when one does not get enough rest and, surely, is not preventable. Because no driver really knows the moment when sleep attack will come over, says a US study. The consequence can be disastrous, especially in long distance driving.

Darkness has descended on most of the US from the Great Lakes to Mexican border and from the Appalachian mountains in the east to the Rockies mountains in the west without power, and large swathes have gone under the snow. Several thousands of flights have been cancelled due to the howling blizzards and zero-visibility in the past few days and medical services are unable to operate sans accessibility. A fast-moving Guv Kathy Hochul has already declared emergency in New York and closed vulnerable airports. Christmas is washed out.

The story is no different in Canada, coming nearer to the pole where the cold vortex cycle has been blasted off (Arctic blast) by the hot winds from an Atlantic, warmed up due to climate change.

The life-threatening situation will continue for several days more. Too taxing for the hypothalamus!

COMMENT: Something is not up and up. For several weeks now overcrowding and serpentine queues during peak hours have been reported at immigration and security checks from major airports like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Passengers are missing flights. On Monday also Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia rushed to Terminal 3 of the IGI Airport in Delhi to see for himself what is amiss.

Peak hour or no peak hour, the airport gives permission for airlines to schedule their flights according to its capacity. And, only those passengers who have booked their tickets will go to the airport. No issue about that. (And, the volume is less than that of pre-covid) The crowding is at the check points. But the ruling clerks decided that the number of flights should be reduced to solve the problem of overcrowding at the check points!!!

Where is the catch? A simple and honest Minister, Scindia looks flummoxed. There is also a multiplicity of 'cross-purpose' authorities at the airport and various remote power centres are pulling the strings!

Tailpiece: Sack the Ministry of clerks, first. We need airport operator, airlines and an aviation regulator, who will be directly answerable to the Minister. Neither the legions of clerks, nor the remotely controlled security personnel. We had done it once in the past, elsewhere.

Let a work culture usher in on its own, as the Americans had prescribed to us decades ago!

COMMENT: Many employees at the Walmart store in Virginia had complained about Andre Bing's misbehaviour. The survivor of the mass shooting had, way back when, complained to the management in writing about the shooter employee's unacceptable behaviour towards her and other employees, on September 10. Her mother too had come and complained to the manager about Bing's abusive behaviour and her concerns about her daughter's safety. But the manager told her that Bing "was liked by the management," while the shooter supervisor of the Chesapeake store should have been delivered to the rehab post-haste. The manager's reply! A usual conundrum employees in India are familiar with but was never thought to be the proclivities of reigning "animal spirits" in the "land of dreams." Seven precious lives lost to the devil's shots!

A half-baked British media report has laid the 'blame' at the Indian High Commission's door for the assumed losses of the British tourists, who have en masse cancelled India trips for want of visas. In the first place, why one must book tour package and then look for visa in a busy season? Because that has been the practice with the tour operators and nothing new. They refund money if visa is not comimg. However, the article is silent on this and implicates the mission alleging it changed the visa rules, while that is contrary to the fact. The UK report, duplicated in India mindlessly, has defamed the Indian High Commission. However, there are some missing links!

A million visitors are queuing up to attend the longest-reigning Queen Elizabeth II Lying-in-State, making history; while a galaxy of world leaders land in London for the State funeral at Westminster Abbey at 11 am (3:30 pm IST) on Monday. It will be a huge gathering of world leaders never seen before. King Charles III hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace for them on Sunday evening. There were 500 dignitaries.

The queue from Southwark Park touches Tower bridge, London bridge, Southwark bridge, Millennium bridge, Blackfriars bridge, Waterloo bridge and Westminster bridge before crossing the Lambeth bridge to enter a zig-zag near the entrance.

The BBC gave a calculation of the length of the queue. The distance from Westminster to Southwark Park, the starting point of the queue, is 11 km. Then there is the zig-zag section of nearly 5 km to rough in. So the queue is meandering slowly up towards Westminster for a total of 16 km! (which in theory becomes a constant). Although, 16 km is quite a lot for standing and moving without any chance to cool your legs for a moment. "Very little opportunity to sit down as the queue will be continuously moving” - the Government itself cautioned a swelling stream of mourners pouring into London from across the kingdom day and night. The time taken can easily be 14 hours! Yet the determination keeps everyone fit as a fiddle.

The calculation doesn't take into account a queue to join the queue that has come up and the last-minute doubling of the official queue into a double lane.

The masses in the queues looked extremely solemn and serious too and displayed an amazing natural discipline that illustrated a national character evolved partly from a thousand years of democratic tradition.

ANALYSIS: Rishi Sunak, the man in a hurry, is alleged to have stabbed BoJo in the back by resigning at the most opportune moment, triggering about 60 more resignations out of coincidence or conspiracy, hitting the nail in Johnson's coffin. Much maligned by a series of scams for quite some time, the voluble, pretentious, hilarious BoJo's support base among the Conservative party MPs had already been crumbling fast, even leading to a no-confidence vote which he narrowly survived a while ago.

Now that he had lost his "best job in the world", BoJo was determined to take revenge on Sunak, and launched vicious underground campaigns like the green card scam to tarnish his image he had been assiduously building up for long in anticipation.

The PM might have played a role in putting up Truss who was not in the reckoning in the beginning when nearly a dozen names were floated for the prime ministerial race. It is said Johnson mobilised support for her from the background, putting to use all the resources at his disposal. Truss thus became the dark horse, gradually taking on the front-runner Sunak.

Assuming for a moment Sunak were not to be a candidate this time, his bringing down the disgraced Prime Minister would have had an enormously positive political advantage for him for future use. The immediate public perception would not have been one of betrayal of BoJo (Although the reality would not change).

He had done many a thing in the immediate past to carve out an artificial image to promote his ambition. Even the $18 billion package might one day be seen as a freebie. Then everything happened in the month of July in supernatural speed. Later he was even directly questioned at several of the hustings about the integrity in bringing down BoJo.

The long and short of it is that morality in public life and literature as an integral part of British culture and long democratic tradition is an invincible force in the kingdom but at times mistakenly taken for granted!

What is the fallout?

The spectacle was an engineering marvel that took India to the world club of demolitions, even as in less than ten seconds it created a gap up in the sky incomprehensible for the layman. Where has it gone!

Founded on compassion, the Amrita hospital will cater for all the economically underprivileged sections of Delhi National Capital Region and beyond. Equipped with cutting-edge technology, the poor will be able to access the latest in healthcare at India's largest hospital.

WHAT TO DO, WHEN... : IndiaTravelTimes does not guarantee the authenticity of the video (above) of the episode of the flight turbulence at Durgapur airport on May 1, yet this is being put out with a view to familiarising the ordinary fliers with such probabilities lest they are caught unawares and fail to react rationally to handle such terrible situations. The 'eternity' can last up to 15 minutes. Tighten your belts, believe in your pilot and shift your thoughts to reduce disabling anxieties! Rest assured, the aircraft can rock and fall but not more than a hundred feet anyway.

During the event, nearly 50 other people, including bull tamers and spectators, were also injured. Jallikattu is a bull-taming sport, which has been part of the festival of Pongal in Tamil Nadu.

Whole localities are sent into quarantine in China using force if someone is symptomatic of covid. The quarantines are metal boxes set up in far away camps. The authoritarian regime is resorting to draconian methods to check a new wave of the epidemic in the country that has already locked down three cities currently. On the other hand, the US presents a contrasting scenario where in the name freedom large sections of people refuse vaccination and assault health workers who mandate the covid restrictions.

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, who opened a new chapter in space age last month by launching the first manned private flight to the edge of space, flying in his own spaceplane, has invited everyone to join his expedition of space travel and experience the thrill of totally losing your weight (BMI = 0) and enjoy the mind-blowing sight of the earth's curvatures from the orbit far above: Register Your Name Here

Can we ask the vaccinator, "Do you pull back the plunger and then push the vaccine? Do you Aspirate?" When the vaccination for covid started there were reports of worrisome incidents of adverse events post immunisation, the serious complaints being non-specific blood clots. These related to viral vector vaccines of human and non-human source: AstraZeneca and Janssen. How did it happen. There are various views. But here is a suggestion how simply it can be prevented.

Marking a fierce but interesting competition among the billionaires, adventure specialist Richard Branson launched commercial space travel from his 'Spaceport America' on Sunday, pipping the world's richest man, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, to the post, becoming the early bird to fly to the edge of space as the first private space tourist nine days earlier than his rival. Although he did not cross the Karman line.

President Biden has signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Bill making June 19 a federal public holiday to commemorate the symbolic end of chattel slavery in the US.

The Mars rover, a six-wheeled, SUV-sized robotic vehicle, sailed through space for seven months to land on a prime spot for geo-biological study of the red planet for signs of ancient extraterrestrial life. It takes radio waves 11 minutes to reach Earth. (Listen to:- DAVID BOWIE: Life On Mars?:)

While the rationalists debunk the episode as a ploy to make up for the losses in offerings during the corona lockdown, the believers stick to their claim, they have seen it after all! The claim of Shankaralinga temple resembles the miracle of Ganesha drinking milk in Delhi way back in 1995. Although they belong to two different branches of science.

After his reappearance, Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares went up by 8.5%. The Chinese billionaire made his public appearance on Wednesday. (SEE Video: Davos 2015 - An Insight An Idea with Jack Ma - A conversation with Jack Ma, Founder and the then Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, on leadership, entrepreneurship and the future of commerce: Interviewed by Charlie Rose, Anchor, CBS News, USA)

A pair of socks gifted to her by her niece displayed on her legs has done the job for Gumball Poodle. The demand for 'Future is Female' is skyrocketing indeed. What more could one ask for?
At that momentous event, "I will be thinking about my mother (the late Shyamala Gopalan), who is looking down from heaven," Harris said. The scaled back presidential inauguration this time will have no precedent with a devastating coronavirus locking down everything and a heightened security bandobast with reports of armed Trump protesters likely to re-enact the Capitol episode posing the gravest threat to Biden, the President-elect, and others.

"We were taught to see a world beyond just ourselves. To be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people." - Kamala Harris, Vice-President-elect, United States of America. She is releasing a series of her reminiscences of her early period, of people and events that had deep influence on the course of her life and thoughts, in the coming days leading up to her inauguration as the Vice-President of America, the first woman ever to occupy a position that high in the greatest democracy yet.

The first woman Vice-President has become an inspiration for girls of colour, and for all girls. Kamala Harris is becoming an icon. Her passionate speech had a great, lasting impact on the listeners, when she said, “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
Ayurveda Consultation for Chronic Diseases like Spondylitis, Arthritis and other Lifestyle illnesses
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Notre Dame Paris cathedral goes up in flames; Macron vows reconstruction
Three killed as plane collides with parked copters in Nepal's Lukla airport
May 'regrets' Jallianwala Bagh, a 'shameful scar in our history'
Boeing not to stop 737 Max production even as new bugs come to light
Narrow escape for tourists as glacier calves, collapses into lagoon in Iceland
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Another Indian woman worker dies of alleged torture in Saudi
Yet another helpless Indian woman having had to go to Saudi Arabia in search of work as maid servant has reportedly died of physical and mental torture by her employer, it has been alleged. However, the Indian Foreign Ministry has said after an inquiry that she died of natural causes.
Lionsgate and Fox coming to Dubai: Go down with the Titanic in theme park!
Unlimited excitement will be on offer in Dubai as Lionsgate Entertainment and The 20th Century Fox are building theme parks to provide the audience an illusion of experiences of timeless horror of the Titanic disaster and the death and rebellion of the dystopia.
Flashfloods claim 80 lives, dozens missing in Indonesia's eastern province of Papua
Sinabung volcano in Indonesia erupts, spews lava: 7 killed
79 foreigners detained in anti-immigration operation in Malaysia
Indonesia readies warships to evacuate haze victims
Typhoon Koppu floods northern Philippines: 11 dead

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(Best time: March-May)
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Vaishno Devi temple, Dal lake, Shalimar Gardens, Hazratbal, Sankaracharya temple, Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonamarg, Indus river, Amarnath temple
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Red Fort, Jama Masjid, Asoka pillar, Humayun's tomb, India Gate, Qutab Minar
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Shimla, Kangra, Jwalamukhi, Dharamshala, Kullu, Manali, Rohtang Pass


PUDUCHERRY (PONDICHERRY)
Promenade Beach, Paradise Beach, Auroville Beach, Serenity Beach, Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Church of the Capuchins, Manakula Vinayagar Temple, Thirukaameeswarar Temple (Periya Koil), Aurobindo Ashram, Auroville, French War Memorial, Romain Rolland Library, Governor's Palace, Bharati Park (Government Park), Light House, Chunnambar Beach, Backwater Resort
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Bangalore (Bengaluru), Whitefield, Mysore, Cauvery, Bagalkot, Halebeedu, Mangalore

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Asaram Bapu sentenced to life for assault on Surat woman disciple
Mother of punk and 'Queen of British Fashion', Vivienne Westwood dies aged 81
Krishna Janmabhoomi case: Mathura court orders survey of Shahi Idgah mosque
Aryan Khan launches luxury lifestyle brand, to sell D’YAVOL Vodka in India
Madras High Court bans mobiles in Tamil Nadu temples to protect their sanctity
Dev Diwali celebrated in Varanasi: lakhs take holy dip in Ganga, light earthen lamps
Stone laid for ropeways from Gaurikund to Kedarnath, Govindghat to Hemkund Sahib

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