Puerto Rico braces for new hurricane season
San Juan, June 2: Puerto Rico is bracing for a new hurricane season just eight months after hurricane Maria, a category 4 storm, slammed into the island causing a major electricity crisis, the media reported.
Maria hit Puerto Rico in September and wiped out the US territory's power grid, leaving the entire island in the dark, reports CNN.
With the 2018 Atlantic Hurricane season under way as of Friday, the desperation among those still without power had led some to take deadly risks to get it back.
"You see it in the eyes of the people, the frustration," Utuado Mayor Ernesto Irizarry told CNN on Friday.
Irizarry said that his city was not prepared for another storm.
Authorities in the cities of Arroyo, Bayamon, San Juan, Anasco, Salinas and Toa Baja said the vulnerable power grid would be the biggest issue if the island was hit soon.
Just weeks ago, an island-wide blackout was caused by a fallen tree, according to the Puerto Rico Power Authority (PREPA).
"I think the most honest thing to say about our grid is that it's weak or fragile," Walt Higgins, the new CEO of PREPA, told CNN.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expects the season, which began June 1, to be "near-or above normal" -- but not to the same degree seen last year.
Aerial view reveals hundreds of homes is the island country still depending on blue tarps to provide shelter in homes.
While the US Army Corps of Engineers has completed the majority of debris removal, the cleanup continues.
Hurricane Maria was one of the worst natural disasters on record to affect Puerto Rico. Sixty-four people were killed in the island.
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Land deal linked money laundering case: Vadra appears before ED on day 2
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New Delhi (PTI): Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the Enforcement Directorate on the second straight day on Tuesday for his questioning in a 2008 Haryana land deal linked money laundering case.
He was accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress MP from Kerala's Wayanad. The two exchanged hugs before Robert Vadra went inside the ED office.
He was questioned for about five hours on Tuesday and his statement was recorded by the federal probe agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), official sources said.
The session will resume on Wednesday, the sources said.
The 56-year-old Vadra had termed the ED action "political vendetta".
He said he has always cooperated with investigative agencies and has furnished huge amount of documents, stressing that there needs to be a closure in cases which are as old as 20 years.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.
The land deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre land in Shikohpur from a firm named Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power that time.
Four years later, in September, 2012, the company sold this 3.53 acre land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got into controversy in October, 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum- Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The opposition Haryana BJP then had called this case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism" hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
