Delhi’s air quality improved marginally on Tuesday but remained in the ‘poor’ category, according to monitoring agencies.

The city’s 24-hour average Air Quality Index (AQI) stood at 220, improving from 263 at 4 pm on Monday.

The 24-hour average AQI settled at 218 in neighbouring Ghaziabad, 179 in Faridabad, 158 in Gurugram, 170 in Noida and 248 in Greater Noida.

An AQI between zero and 50 is considered ‘good’, 51 and 100 ‘satisfactory’, 101 and 200 ‘moderate’, 201 and 300 ‘poor’, 301 and 400 ‘very poor’, and 401 and 500 ‘severe’.

On Sunday, Delhi’s air quality turned ‘very poor’ for the first time since May, mainly due to a drop in temperature and wind speed, which allowed pollutants to accumulate. A few incidents of firecracker burning were also reported from parts of Delhi on the occasion of Dussehra on Tuesday.

In accordance with the practice of the last three years, Delhi had last month announced a comprehensive ban on the manufacture, storage, sale and use of firecrackers within the capital city.

A public awareness campaign, ‘Patakhe Nahi Diye Jalao’, will be soon reintroduced to discourage burning of firecrackers.

Unfavourable meteorological conditions and a cocktail of emissions from firecrackers and paddy straw burning, in addition to local sources of pollution, push Delhi-NCR’s air quality to hazardous levels around Diwali every year.

On Monday, Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai said the government has identified eight more pollution hotspots in addition to the existing 13 in the national capital and special teams will be deployed there to check pollution sources.

Rai said the government has also decided to use suppressant powder to prevent dust pollution in the city.

Dust suppressants could include chemical agents like calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, lignosulfonates and various polymers. These chemicals work by attracting and binding fine dust particles together, making them too heavy to become airborne.

The minister also said the government will relaunch a campaign to curb vehicular pollution on October 26, a year after Lieutenant Governor (LG) V K Saxena put it on hold, questioning its effectiveness.

Sources in the city government’s environment department said the LG’s permission will not be required for the “Red Light On Gaadi Off” campaign this year as the participants will not receive any honorarium, unlike in previous seasons.

A woman who left Britain to marry an Islamic State jihadist fighter when she was a teenager began her appeal against the revocation of her citizenship in a UK court Tuesday.

A lawyer for Shamima Begum, 24, told the Court of Appeal in London that the Home Office had failed to consider its legal duties owed to her client as a potential victim of trafficking. 

“The appellant’s trafficking was a mandatory, relevant consideration in determining whether it was conducive to the public good and proportionate to deprive her of citizenship, but it was not considered by the Home Office,” Samantha Knights said in a written submission to the court.

“As a consequence, the deprivation decision was unlawful.”

Shamima Begum was 15 when she left her east London home for Syria with two school friends in 2015. 

While there, she married an ISIS fighter and had three children, none of whom survived. 

In February 2019, Begum said she was left stateless when Britain’s interior minister at the time, Sajid Javid, revoked her British citizenship on national security grounds after she was found in a Syrian refugee camp. 

A UK tribunal ruled in 2020 that she was not stateless because she was “a citizen of Bangladesh by descent” when the decision was made, by virtue of her Bangladeshi mother. 

Earlier this year, Begum lost a challenge against the decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). 

The SIAC said that while there was a “credible suspicion that Begum was recruited, transferred and then harboured for the purpose of sexual exploitation”, this did not prevent Sajid Javid from removing her citizenship. 

The ruling meant that Begum could not return to the UK from her current home, a refugee camp in northern Syria. 

Lawyers for the Home Office, which is set to begin oral arguments on Wednesday, told the court that SIAC’s conclusion was correct. 

“The fact that someone is radicalised, and may have been manipulated, is not inconsistent with the assessment that they pose a national security risk,” James Eadie said in written submissions for the department. 

The hearing is set to conclude on Thursday, with a decision expected at a later date. 

Shamima Begum is one of hundreds of Europeans whose fate has challenged governments following the 2019 collapse of the Islamist extremists’ self-styled caliphate. 

Knights told the five-day SIAC hearing last November that her client had been “influenced” along with her friends by a “determined and effective” IS group “propaganda machine”. 

Around 900 people are estimated to have travelled from Britain to Syria and Iraq to join the IS group. Of those, around 150 are believed to have been stripped of their citizenship, according to government figures.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved to dampen media pressure over the government’s conduct in the war against the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza, issuing a statement insisting he was in full accord with his defence and army chiefs.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has seen his already falling approval ratings plunge following the October 7 Hamas attack, which killed some 1,400 people in the deadliest day for Israel in its 75-year history.

On Monday, amid growing expectations of an imminent ground operation against Hamas in Gaza, Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest circulation newspaper, published a stinging attack on the government, saying that a “crisis of confidence” had developed between Netanyahu and the army leadership.

“It has deeply impeded the need to focus on the war and on making decisions, including painful decisions. Israel now needs an effective, task-oriented leadership,” it said.

Making the comparison with the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which began with an attack by Egypt and Syria that caught Israeli forces unprepared, the newspaper said that the country’s leaders 50 years ago were able to restore confidence before Israel achieved final victory.

“Nowadays, Israel is managing, but it doesn’t have a functioning management,” it said.

Late on Monday, Netanyahu’s office, together with the defence minister and the army chief of staff, issued a statement saying they were working together in full cooperation and urging the media to avoid “false publications that only harm our unity and strength”.

“Between Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff there is complete and mutual trust and a clear unity of purpose,” the statement said.

Israel has carried out an intense air and artillery bombardment of the Gaza Strip, killing more than 5,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, and has massed troops around the densely populated enclave.

On Tuesday, the army spokesperson said the military was ready to open the ground campaign against Gaza, whenever the political leadership gave it the green light.

However, there has been growing pressure from the United States to hold off on an invasion.

Shock

Netanyahu has said the government will draw the necessary lessons from what happened on October 7. But he has so far defied pressure to take responsibility for the security failures that allowed hundreds of Hamas gunmen to break through the barriers around Gaza and embark on an extended killing spree in communities in southern Israel.

The criticism of the government, echoed in other media, has also come from other quarters, including the country’s mayors who found themselves having to take on a heavy share of the immediate relief work in the wake of the attack.

“I understand that everyone was in shock at what happened. It took the military a day or two to recover. It took the local authorities a day or two to recover,” Haim Bibas, mayor of the city of Modiin and chairman of the Federation of mayoralities, told Channel 12 television at the weekend.

“The government ministries have not, as of now, recovered.”

Netanyahu, who returned to power this year at the head of a hard-right nationalist-religious coalition, had already faced months of some of the biggest demonstrations in Israel’s history against his plans to overhaul the powers of the Supreme Court.

But the government’s unpopularity has plumbed new depths with ministers regularly abused by furious Israelis during encounters with the public.

In the wake of the October 7 attack, Netanyahu invited former Defence Minister Benny Gantz, who leads one of the centrist opposition parties, to join his war cabinet as part of an emergency unity government.

But his own personal standing, already clouded by a corruption trial on charges that he denies, has been badly damaged and a recent poll showed Gantz was now a far more popular choice as prime minister.