Now, marriages, photo-shoots & xmas festivities turn anti-CAA protest venues in Kerala

Agencies
December 24, 2019

Kochi, Dec 24: Not just open streets and college campuses, but even marriages, pre-wedding photo-shoots and Christmas festivities seem to be turning into protest venues against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Kerala.

Cutting across religion, youths from various parts of the state have posted their wedding photos, in which the bride and groom hold placards saying 'No CAA.. No NRC" at the marriage venues, on social media, all of which have gone viral.

In some viral videos, brides and grooms walk to the reception venue holding placards criticising the CAA, while in others, they are initiated into the hall by their friends raising slogans against the Act and expressing solidarity with those protesting against it across the country.

In one video, a beautiful bride, wearing a richly decorated red lehanga, holds an anti-CAA placard in one hand while walking hand-in-hand with the groom through a busy road.

Their friends raise slogans against the CAA and walk behind them.

Huge posters, usually erected by friends to greet the newly-wed couple in villages, have also become a space for anti-CAA slogans.

A poster with photos of a couple appeared in politically volatile Kannur district recently and read "India will not budge...we will not be silent".

In one of the photos, which has gone viral, a Hindu groom wearing a Muslim skull cap walks along with the bride, apparently as a mark of protest against Prime Minister Modi's controversial remarks that those indulging in arson can be identified by their clothes.

Arun Gopi and Asha Shekhar, who recently shot their 'save-the-date' photos, holding placards against CAA and NRC, said they wanted to send a message through the innovative idea.

'Save-the-date' is a practice among youth to announce the wedding date.

The couple, who will tie the knot on January 30, said they decided to make the pre-wedding photos a political statement and so came out with photos with anti-CAA messages.

The photos were an instant hit on social media.

A group of students of Mahatma Gandhi Univesity in Kottayam recently organised their annual Christmas celebrations on the campus in a different way-with Santa Clauses carrying placards and posters against CAA and holding the photos of national leaders like Gandhiji and Ambedkar.

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Agencies
March 16,2020

While Google is still working on a coronavirus screening and tracking website, Microsoft Bing team has already launched a web portal for tracking COVID-19 infections worldwide.

The website, accessible at bing.com/covid, provides up-to-date infection statistics for each country.

The COVID-19 Tracker currently lists 168,835 as total confirmed cases, 84,558 active cases, 77,761 recovered cases and 6,516 deaths.

There are at least 3,244 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the US and at least 61 deaths.

"Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping and authoritative news resource for COVID19 info," Michael Schechter, General Manager for Bing Growth and Distribution at Microsoft, was quoted as saying in a ZDNet report on Sunday.

An interactive map allows site visitors to click on the country to see the specific number of cases and related articles from a variety of publishers.

Data is being aggregated from sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

Microsoft announced the website two days after US President Donald Trump said Google has begun working on COVID-19-related portal for US citizens.

Google's website is being built by Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on healthcare services.

"More than 1,700 engineers are currently working on the site", Trump said during a press briefing last week.

The tool will triage people who are concerned about their COVID-19 risk into testing sites based on guidance from public health officials and test availability.

Initially, there was some confusion on Google's coronavirus portal but the company later announced that it is "partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk, and testing information."

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News Network
February 21,2020

London, Feb 21: Scientists have discovered a new species of land snail, and have named it Craspedotropis Greta Thunberg in honour of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg for her efforts to raise awareness about climate change.

According to the study, published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, the newly discovered species belongs to the so-called caenogastropods -- a group of land snails known to be sensitive to drought, temperature extremes, and forest degradation.

The scientists, including evolutionary ecologist Menno Schilthuizen from Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, said the snails were found very close to the research field station at Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre in Brunei.

They added that the snails were discovered at the foot of a steep hill-slope, next to a river bank, foraging at night on the green leaves of understorey plants.

The effort aided by amateur scientist J.P. Lim, who found the first individual of the snail said, "Naming this snail after Greta Thunberg is our way of acknowledging that her generation will be responsible for fixing problems that they did not create."

"And it's a promise that people from all generations will join her to help," Lim said.

The researchers said they approached Thunberg who said that she would be "delighted" to have this species named after her.

The study work including, fieldwork, morphological study, and classification of identified specimen was carried out in a field centre with basic equipment and no internet access, the scientists said.

According to the study, the work was done by untrained ‘citizen scientists’ guided by experts, on a 10-day taxon expedition.

"While we are aware that this way of working has its limitations in terms of the quality of the output (for example, we were unable to perform dissections or to do extensive literature searches), the benefits include rapid species discovery and on-site processing of materials," the researchers wrote in the study.

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Agencies
January 19,2020

New Delhi, Jan 19: Messaging service WhatsApp which on Sunday faced issues in transmitting multimedia content including pictures and images, prompting social media users to share hilarious memes and messages, resumed regular services after over two hours.

#WhatsAppDown was the trending hashtag on Twitter for most part of Sunday afternoon in India along with several other countries such as Brazil, Europe and also parts of Middle-East including UAE, reported downdetector.in, a realtime problem and outage monitoring website.

Users of the popular messaging app were unable to send media files, stickers and GIFs.

Most users immediately went to Twitter to find out about the problem and check if others were facing the same issue.

Numerous tweets and memes took over the internet as soon as the news broke about the WhatsApp tech issue. After around two hours of technical glitch, the app resumed full service.

Even after full recovery of media transfer, people globally still continued checking the status of the messaging app.

WhatsApp has been one of the prime messaging apps since May 2009 and has recently collaborated with Facebook.

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