I asked if it were a crime to be a Muslim? Officials of the City Crime Branch said yes'

November 1, 2013

City_Crime_Branch

How did you land in this case?

I hail from Melapalyam district of Tamil Nadu. I have lived in Bengaluru for the past seven years and sell tealeaves at Tannery Road area of the city. I was arrested from Chennai on 18 April, the day after the blast. I was shopping for my sister's marriage when policemen in plain clothes arrested my brother-in-law Basheer and me. We were grilled till late midnight, and then handed over to the Karnataka police. On 19 April, we were produced before the magistrate's court in Bengaluru. It was then that I realised that I was being framed in the BJP office blast case. Until then the police just kept asking me if I knew Panna Ismail, which I denied. I have never met him. It was later that I learnt that my brother-in-law's SIM card was with Ismail and I'd called on that number. That's how I was trapped in this case.

You were in Karnataka police's custody for a month. What happened in that one month?

It was the worst period of my life. I went through much mental agony. Had I stayed there for another 15 days, I would have had a mental break down. Our hands and feet were chained when we were brought to Bengaluru from Chennai. Karnataka police wanted me to accept my involvement in the blast. When I refused, they wanted me to identify Panna Ismail at least. After three days, they said because they have nothing against me they would release me in exchange for a favour. They wanted me to testify before the magistrate that Panna Ismail came in a bike and left a green polythene bag at my place. I refused immediately saying that I live in an area where around 10,000 people from Melapalyam live. If I were to accept any involvement in the case, nobody would give a house to our people and everybody would look at us with suspicion.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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Agencies
June 10,2020

US dictionary Merriam-Webster will update the meaning of the word "racism" after being contacted by a Missouri black woman, who claimed the current definition fell short of including the systematic oppression of people of colour, according to media reports.

"A revision to the entry for racism is now being drafted to be added to the dictionary soon, and we are also planning to revise the entries of other words that are related to racism or have racial connotations," according to a statement of the 189-year-old dictionary shared by Kennedy Mitchum, a recent graduate of Drake University in Iowa, on her Facebook.

Mitchum, 22, emailed the dictionary last month, following the death of African American George Floyd in the custody of four Minneapolis police officers, Xinhua news agency reported.

"I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world," Mitchum told CNN. "The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice, it's the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans."

Merriam-Webster's first definition of racism is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."

"It's not just disliking someone because of their race," Mitchum wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. "This current fight we are in is evidence of that, lives are at stake because of the systems of oppression that go hand-in-hand with racism."

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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