NDTV TOP STORIES
1. A study on mixing Covishield and Covaxin, the two main vaccines used in India's COVID-19 vaccination programme, given the go ahead by the Drugs Controller General Of India (DCGI), say sources. This study and its clinical trials, sources add, will be conducted by Vellore's Christian Medical College. 2. Indian embassy issues fresh security advisory, asking all its citizens residing in Afghanistan to make immediate travel arrangements to return home before commercial air services are discontinued from the country in view of a massive spike in violence. In the advisory, the Indian embassy in Kabul also asks the Indian companies operating in Afghanistan to immediately withdraw their Indian employees out of project sites before air travel services from the country is discontinued. 3. The national 'R' value, or the reproductive rate of the coronavirus, is over the potentially dangerous 1.0 mark, the government says, amid continuing fears that a third wave of COVID-19 infections could strike later this month. According to the government (and as of today), Punjab and Himachal Pradesh have an effective 'R' value of 1.3, and Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have 'R' values of 1.1 and 1.0. Expected change in daily cases from three states is 'likely increasing'; the trend from Punjab is 'increasing'. 4. As Mumbai gears up for resuming suburban train services for the fully vaccinated public from August 15, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has started with an offline verification process for fully vaccinated people and issuing monthly passes at 53 railway stations from today. 5. Lok Sabha passes a bill which, when it becomes law, will allow states and Union Territories to draw up their own list of other backward communities. These lists can be different from the Central government's. The bill gets cleared with 385 votes for and none against it. 6. Eight political parties including BJP, Congress fined by Supreme Court for not making public criminal cases against candidates. 7. New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo announces his resignation over a barrage of sexual harassment allegations in a fall from grace a year after he was widely hailed nationally for his detailed daily briefings and leadership during some of the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cuomo will hand over the reins of the nation's fourth-most populous state to Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat who will become New York's first-ever female governor.
