-The Telegraph A set of numbers, portents of atmospheric changes in the skies over India, had told meteorologist Om Prakash Singh something rare was going to happen over northwest India. It was Thursday, June 13, and a supercomputer that routinely crunches out five-day forecasts had consistently predicted a confluence of two weather systems, likely to take place by the weekend and deliver copious rainfall. As Singh and his colleagues at the India Meteorological...

-The Hindustan Times If there is one defining collage of the ongoing monsoon mayhem in Uttarakhand, it's this: multi-storied concrete houses collapsing like a pack of cards into an angry, wild river and cars and lorries being tossed around in the swirling muddy waters, as if they were plastic toys. As I watched the unfolding drama on TV, I remembered what a green campaigner told me some years ago in Uttarkashi:...

-The Times of India DEHRADUN/SHIMLA: Torrential rains continued to pour in bad news from north India on Tuesday, with flash floods, cloudbursts and landslips claiming 69 more lives and taking the official death toll to 131, making for the most tragic tidings of monsoon in recent years. More than 73,000 pilgrims bound for the Himalayan shrines of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri remained stranded in Uttarakhand and about 1,700 tourists were...

-The Telegraph At least 50 people have died in rain-triggered landslides, house collapses and flash floods in the north, mostly in Uttarakhand that has halted the popular Badrinath pilgrimage with around 30,000 pilgrims, many from Bengal, stranded. Three days of incessant rain have sent into spate Uttarakhand rivers that have burst banks and washed away houses - one of them a four-storey structure that had been vacated, apart from a temple. At least...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The doctors at a private hospital recently diagnosed a 23-day-old child with life-threatening 'blue baby syndrome' caused by consumption of contaminated water. They found that the baby, from Dhamori Khurd village in Gautam Budh Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, was being fed packaged formula milk mixed in water from the borewell, which had high nitrate content, as clean drinking water was not available. "When the baby came...