News in Short

• The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a red alert for Mumbai and nearby areas as heavy rains lashed several districts in Maharashtra.
• Intense rain accompanied by strong winds lashed Mumbai and uprooted hundreds of trees across the city, submerged vast areas and also resulted in the collapse of buildings.
• The red alert was issued for Mumbai, Thane, Palghar, Raigad, Pune, Ahmednagar and Nashik districts of Maharashtra. For Thane, Palghar and Nashik, the red alert has been sounded for both Wednesday and Thursday.

• Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was 91.
• Grau won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for her fourth book, The Keepers of the House. The book drew critical praise but also threatening phone calls for its depiction of a long romance between a wealthy white man and his black housekeeper in rural Alabama.
• Her six novels and four short story collections were all set in the Deep South, from New Orleans to north Louisiana and Alabama. Many of Grau’s stories deal with sudden, unexplained events and their aftermath.

• Noted Delhi-based writer and activist Sadia Dehlvi has passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer. She was 63.
• Sadia, who hailed from the royal ‘Shama’ family, edited Bano, an Urdu women’s journal. Her grandfather, Hafiz Yusuf Dehlvi, founded in 1938 Shama, an iconic Urdu film and literary monthly.
• A well-known food connoisseur, she wrote a book on Delhi’s culinary history in 2017, titled Jasmine &Jinns: Memories and Recipes of My Delhi.
• Sadia also produced and scripted documentaries and television programmes, including “Amma and Family” (1995), starring Zohra Sehgal, a veteran stage actor.

• A new plant species of the genus Ardisia spotted in the biodiversity-rich Western Ghats has been named after an early 20th century botanist who helped expand the knowledge on Indian flora.
• They have named it Ardisia Ramaswami after M.S. Ramaswami, who, with C.C. Calder and V. Narayanaswami, listed species not mentioned in J.D. Hooker’s Flora of British India.
• Scientists encountered the new species in the Akkamalai forest within the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu recent.
• Ardisiaramaswamii (family Primulaceae) is a small tree which grows to a height of about six metres. The team stumbled upon the species while searching for Kurinji tree.

• Former union minister Manoj Sinha has been appointed the new Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir as President Ramnath Kovind has accepted the resignation of Girish Chandra Murmu.
• Sinha has been a member of the BJP national council from 1989 to 1996. He was elected to the Lower House for a third term in national politics when the BJP swept the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
• He was former Minister of State for Railways and later and later held an independent charge of Ministry of Communication.