In a major boost to Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) ahead of Telangana assembly elections, former minister Nagam Janardhan Reddy, former MLA Vishnuvardhan Reddy, Kolhapur leader Rampulla Reddy, Karimnagar leader Kota Jaipal Reddy and other Congress leaders joined the ruling party in the presence of party president and Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR).

The senior Congress leaders were welcomed to BRS by Chief Minister KCR in an event held at Telangana Bhavan in Hyderabad on Tuesday.

While addressing the event, Chief Minister KCR said, “Nagam Janardhan Reddy was active in the Telangana movement of 1969. He also went to jail. With Nagam Janardhan joining, our strength doubled. It is certain that we will win fourteen seats in Palamuru.”

“Vishnuvardhan Reddy is my responsibility for a good political future. PJR is my best friend, his son Vishnu is like a member of my family. I request Vishnu and MLA Mahanti Gopinath to work together,” he added.

He also slammed the opposition in Telangana accusing them of “bad politics” and said that the elections will be a “slap on their faces”.

“Telangana is moving forward with tremendous progress, per capita income has increased. 24-hour electricity is not available anywhere else in the country. The opposition parties are doing bad politics because they can’t bear to see the development, yesterday they attacked Kotha MP Prabhakar Reddy. Prabhakar Reddy survived by the grace of God. This kind of attack cannot be tolerated. We have to be careful and win the elections which will be a slap on their faces, let’s all move forward unitedly,” the BRS chief said.

Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) MP, Kotha Prabhakar Reddy, was stabbed in the stomach by an unidentified person during his campaign in Siddipet on Monday, said Siddipet police. Reddy is a BRS candidate from the Dubbak assembly.

Prabhakar Reddy was attacked in Surampally village of the Daulatabad mandal.

The counting of votes for Telangana, along with those of four other poll-bound states, is scheduled for December 3.

The state is set to witness an intriguing triangular contest between the ruling BRS, Congress, and the BJP.

In the previous Assembly elections in 2018, the BRS won 88 of the 119 seats, hogging 47.4 per cent of the total vote share.

The Congress finished a distant second with 19 seats and a vote share of 28.7 per cent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina today jointly inaugurated three projects via virtual mode, including a key rail link between Tripura’s Nischintapur and Gangasagar in the neighbouring country.

The other two projects inaugurated by PM Modi and Sheikh Hasina are the 65-km Khulna-Mongla Port Rail Line, and Unit 2 of the Maitree Super Thermal Power Plant in Bangladesh’s Rampal.

The 15-km Agartala-Akhaura Cross Border Rail Link is expected to boost cross-border trade and significantly reduce the travel time between Agartala and Kolkata via Dhaka.

“It is a matter of joy that we have connected once again to celebrate the success of the India-Bangladesh cooperation,” PM Modi said in an interaction with Sheikh Hasina over video-conferencing.

“In the past nine years, the work we have done together has not happened in decades,” he said.
 

The second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig has died, 40 days after the highly experimental surgery, CNN reported. Lawrence Faucette, 58, was dying from heart failure when he received the genetically modified pig heart on September 20. According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the heart had seemed healthy for the first month but began showing signs of rejection in recent days. He lived for nearly six weeks after the surgery and died on Monday.

”Mr. Faucette had made significant progress after his surgery, engaging in physical therapy, spending time with family members, and playing cards with his wife, Ann. In recent days, his heart began to show initial signs of rejection –the most significant challenge with traditional transplants involving human organs as well. Despite the medical team’s greatest efforts, Mr. Faucette ultimately succumbed on October 30,” a statement released by the hospital said. 

Mr. Faucette was a Navy veteran and retired lab technician at the National Institutes of Health. He had been turned down for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when he came to the Maryland hospital.  Without the experimental transplant, the father of two was facing near-certain heart failure.

Mr Faucette’s wife, Ann, said her husband ”knew his time with us was short and this was his last chance to do for others. He never imagined he would survive as long as he did.”

”Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable. He then told the team of doctors and nurses who gathered around him that he loved us. We will miss him tremendously,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, clinical director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine said. 

Transplanting animal organs into humans, called xenotransplantation, could offer a solution to the chronic shortage of human organ donations. However, these procedures are challenging because the patient’s immune system attacks the foreign organ. Scientists hoped that genetically modifying pig parts to make them more like human organs would work.

The Maryland team last year had also performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another man. He died two months after his transplant. David Bennett, 57, received his transplant on January 7, 2022, and died on March 8, the University of Maryland Medical System said in a statement.