Now, fines slapped by Mangaluru traffic police can be paid at post offices

Campaigning for 14 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka going to polls in the first phase on April 26 will come to an end on Wednesday evening.

A total of 247 candidates -- 226 men and 21 women -- are in the fray for this round of voting in most of the southern and coastal districts.

It is a straight electoral contest between the ruling Congress and the BJP-Janata Dal (Secular) combine in the State.

While the Congress is contesting in all 14 seats, BJP has fielded nominees in 11, and its alliance partner JD(S) in three -- Hassan, Mandya and Kolar.

Besides the three, the segments where elections will be held on Friday are: Udupi-Chikmagalur, Dakshina Kannada, Chitradurga, Tumkur, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Bangalore Rural, Bangalore North, Bangalore Central, Bangalore South and Chikkballapur.

The intense campaigning for the past about a month saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah leading from the front for the BJP, holding rallies and roadshows. BJP President J P Nadda, some Union Ministers and Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant too pitched in.

Veteran BJP leader and former Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa and the party's state president B Y Vijayendra also campaigned extensively.

Congress president M Mallikarjun Kharge, senior leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar and Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy were among the prominent names who led the charge for the party.

And for the JD(S), it was the 90-year-old party patriarch and former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and former Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, who led the campaign.

Chikkaballapur has a maximum number of 29 candidates, followed by 24 in Bangalore Central and Dakshina Kannada has the least number - nine.

Kumaraswamy from Mandya, his brother-in-law and noted cardiologist C N Manjunath from Bangalore Rural on a BJP ticket, erstwhile Mysuru royal family scion Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar from Mysore, also from the BJP, and state Congress President Shivakumar's brother and MP D K Suresh from Bangalore Rural, are among the prominent candidates in the fray in the first phase.

The state has a total of 28 Lok Sabha segments. The remaining 14 constituencies, mostly in the northern districts, will go to polls on May seven.

Gaza civil defense agency has warned of a looming health disaster in the besieged Strip as the decomposition of dead bodies under the rubble of buildings destroyed by the relentless Israeli bombings accelerates.

The agency pointed on Tuesday to the risk of diseases and epidemics associated with the public decomposition of thousands of bodies due to rising temperature.

“The continued accumulation of thousands of bodies under the rubble has begun to cause the spread of disease and epidemics, especially with the onset of summer and the rise in temperatures, which accelerates the process of decomposition,” it said in a statement.

Seven months into the war, the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned earlier that the decomposition of dead bodies for long periods leads to the transmission of serious diseases, including blood-borne viruses and tuberculosis.

"Gastrointestinal infections like cholera can also be easily spread through direct contact with dead bodies leaking excrement, soiled clothing, or contaminated tools or vehicles," it added.

In another report last week, Euro-Med Monitor also warned that thousands of corpses left in the streets or beneath house debris are rotting and being consumed by cats and dogs, which is an additional factor contributing to the spread of infectious diseases.

"The spread threatens the environment and public health in the Strip, and health authorities in the Strip have detected about one million cases of infectious diseases," the report added.

The Global Nutrition Group also estimates that at least 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s children under the age of five are affected by one or more infectious diseases and that 70 percent have had diarrhea in the past two weeks—a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.

Unexpected blistering temperatures across Gaza have also added to the daily misery faced by the enclave’s people and sparked new fears of disease outbreaks amid a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, also known as UNRWA said on Thursday.

This comes as the death toll from Israel's genocidal campaign against Gaza rose to 34,535. Among the dead are more than 14,500 children and 9,500 women.

Since the war began on October 7, nearly 85 percent of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced.

Vast swathes of the besieged territory are in ruins as Israel continues its onslaught, dropping at least 75,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, according to the Gaza Media Office.

Earlier this month, UNRWA, said 62 percent of all houses in the besieged territory have been damaged or destroyed.

Gaza Media Office recently reported that nearly 90,000 housing units have been destroyed while nearly 300,000 units have been damaged by the Israeli air and ground offensive.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on Monday that nearly 37.5 million tons of conflict-generated debris are estimated to be present throughout Gaza, based on assessments by UN bodies.

The world’s hunger watchdog, known as the Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), said in a report published on March 18 that about 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza are living through catastrophic food insecurity, warning that famine is likely to strike by May in northern Gaza and can spread across the territory by July.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a report published in late March that there were clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.

These acts Albanese said were “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces has said it has carried out new operations against American and British targets in retaliation for their aggression on the country.

Brigadier General Yahya Saree said on Friday that Yemen’s naval forces struck a British oil tanker in the Red Sea with missiles.

Saree also said the military also shot down an American MQ-9 drone in Sa’ada province.

He added that the new operations were also a show of solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, amid the Israeli genocide there. 

“The Yemeni Armed Forces salute all the people of Yemen for their faithful response to the call of the fighter leader Sayyed Abdulmalik Badr El-Din Al-Houthi, may Allah protect him, in their unprecedented large-scale interaction in support of our oppressed brothers in the Gaza Strip, affirming support for the Armed Forces in their military operations against the ‘Israeli’ enemy and against the American-British aggression supporting it in the Red and Arabian Seas and the Indian Ocean,” Saree said.

He stressed that the Yemeni armed forces will continue operations in the Red and Arabian Seas as well as the Indian Ocean until the Western-backed Israeli genocide comes to a halt.

Since the start of the brutal campaign in Gaza, the regime has killed more than 34,300 Palestinians and injured over 77,000 others. It has cut off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.

The Yemeni Armed Forces have been targeting Israeli vessels or those “associated” with the occupying regime in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea since October 7, 2023.

The regime ignited its bloody war machine in the besieged Palestinian territory on that October day in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm conducted by the resistance movement Hamas.

The maritime attacks have forced some of the world’s biggest shipping and oil companies to suspend transit through one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes.

Tankers are instead adding thousands of miles to international shipping routes by sailing around the continent of Africa rather than going through the Suez Canal.

The pro-Palestine maritime campaign has also prompted airstrikes by the US and its allies on Yemen – in violation of the Yemeni sovereignty and international law.

In consequence, Yemen’s armed forces have declared US and British vessels as legitimate targets.