Will ensure that BJP wins all 28 seats of Karnataka in 2019 Lok Sabha polls: BSY

Bengaluru, Jan 25: Several women have completed a 24-hour protest here against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and are going strong to stretch it to 48 hours.

"More than a thousand women gathered on the Masjid Road at Frazer Town to denounce the CAA and National Register of Citizens (NRC)," participant and Mount Carmel College student Noor Zahira told IANS.

The women protesters extended their support to the students in Jamia Millia Islamia, the Aligarh Muslim University, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and others who were recently roughed up allegedly by police and masked goons.

Zahira, 20, said the women's protest was planned only for 24 hours but is continuing to touch 48 hours.

Starting 3pm on Thursday, the women, several of them in burqas, niqabs and hijabs, are sitting on the road just outside the Haji Sait mosque in Frazer Town in a flash protest. Though they have informed the police, they did not wait for the permission. Around 11 pm, police arrived and shut off the protesters' loud speakers.

Zahira said already four such women's anti-CAA protests were taken out in Bengaluru. Women from all ages groups have joined the protest and are sloganeering.

As the women are protesting on the road, men are guarding them standing on the opposite road, ensuring all supplies such as food and others to them, she added.

"Muslim women were not alone in denouncing the CAA... we were joined by the transgenders, Hindu women, Christian women, Dalits and others, " she said.

Some of the protesters also indulged in creative work such as composing songs against the CAA and making placards.

Though four anti-CAA women's protests happened at the Town Hall and other landmarks in Bengaluru, they were only a few hours long.

The protesting women are also showing support to women protesters at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi who were accused of demonstrating for Rs 500. However, the protest did not align anti-CAA demonstration with any political party, keeping it apolitical.

Washington, Jun 30: Researchers in China have discovered a new type of swine flu that is capable of triggering a pandemic, according to a study published Monday in the US science journal PNAS.

Named G4, it is genetically descended from the H1N1 strain that caused a pandemic in 2009.

It possesses "all the essential hallmarks of being highly adapted to infect humans," say the authors, scientists at Chinese universities and China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers then carried out various experiments including on ferrets, which are widely used in flu studies because they experience similar symptoms to humans -- principally fever, coughing and sneezing. 

G4 was observed to be highly infectious, replicating in human cells and causing more serious symptoms in ferrets than other viruses.

Tests also showed that any immunity humans gain from exposure to seasonal flu does not provide protection from G4.

According to blood tests which showed up antibodies created by exposure to the virus, 10.4 percent of swine workers had already been infected.

The tests showed that as many as 4.4 percent of the general population also appeared to have been exposed.

The virus has therefore already passed from animals to humans but there is no evidence yet that it can be passed from human to human -- the scientists' main worry.

"It is of concern that human infection of G4 virus will further human adaptation and increase the risk of a human pandemic," the researchers wrote.

The authors called for urgent measures to monitor people working with pigs.

"The work comes as a salutary reminder that we are constantly at risk of new emergence of zoonotic pathogens and that farmed animals, with which humans have greater contact than with wildlife, may act as the source for important pandemic viruses," said James Wood, head of the department of veterinary medicine at Cambridge University.

A zoonotic infection is caused by a pathogen that has jumped from a non-human animal into a human.

Chennai, Jun 10: DMK MLA J Anbazhagan who had tested positive for coronavirus and was on ventilator support from June 3 passed away at a hospital in Chennai on Wednesday.

Coincidently, today is the 62nd birthday of the MLA.

"Anbazhagan J, who has been fighting for his life with severe COVID 19 pneumonia rapidly deteriorated early this morning. In spite of full medical support including mechanical ventilation at our COVID facility, he succumbed to his illness. He was declared dead at 08:05 hours on the 10th of June 2020," the hospital said in a statement.

In 2001, Anbazhagan was elected from T Nagar Assembly constituency. He served for five years.

Later in 2011, he was elected to Tamil Nadu Assembly from Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni seat. The DMK leader was re-elected from the same constituency in 2016.