News in Short

• A new study by the Imperial College London has shown how CMEs could be more extreme than previously thought when two events follow each other.
• CMEs can be catastrophic, causing power blackouts that would disable anything plugged into a socket and damage transformers that could take years to repair. Accurate monitoring and predictions are, therefore, essential to minimizing damage.
• When they reach Earth, these solar storms trigger amazing auroral displays and disrupt power grids, satellites, and communications.
• Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun’s corona.
• They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength.

• A tenth of all patients infected with the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) become “superspreaders” and account for 60% of new infections, while 70% of infected patients do not pass the disease to anyone else, shows a study on transmission patterns of Sars-CoV-2.
• The contact tracing study looked at disease transmission patterns in at least 575,000 people who were exposed to nearly 85,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in two Indian states — Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
• The studyalso found that the median hospital stay before death due to the Covid-19 in the two states was around five days, compared to 13 days in the United States.

• The southwest monsoon this year has ended with an 8.7% surplus, surpassing estimates by the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
• This was also the first time since 2010 that India has got more than 100% of its long period average (LPA), of 88 cm, in consecutive years. Last year India saw record rainfall of 110% of the LPA, the highest in a quarter century.
• The heavy rains this year have been due to several long-lasting low-pressure systems in the Bay of Bengal that fuelled heavy rains over large swathes of India in August.
• The monsoon has started to withdraw from northern India and is expected to do so until the north-eastern monsoon sets in by mid October.

• Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has asked relevant authorities to take steps to bring back PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif from London, to face corruption cases pending against him in various Pakistani courts.
• The government had earlier sent a request to the British government for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader's repatriation.
• On September 15, the Islamabad High Court issued non-bailable arrest warrants for Sharif who failed to surrender before it despite clear warning by the bench.
• The three-time premier, his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar were convicted in the Avenfield properties case on July 6, 2018. Sharif was also sentenced to seven years in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills case in December 2018.

• After a five-month battle with leukemia, the first known person to be cured of HIV, Timothy Ray Brown, has died of cancer. He was also known as "the Berlin patient”.
• Brown was considered cured of his HIV infection in 2008. In the year prior, Brown received a bone marrow transplant in Berlin, Germany, to treat a separate disease he had been diagnosed with: acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
• The bone marrow he received came from a donor whose genes carried a rare mutation that made the donor naturally resistant to HIV, known as CCR5-delta 32, which was transferred on to Brown.