Sep 15 (IANS) Roger Federer, a 20-time Grand Slam singles champion, on Thursday announced his retirement from top-level tennis, saying that Laver cup will be his final ATP tour event.
The 41-year-old has not played since Wimbledon 2021, after which he had a third knee operation.
“Laver cup next month will be my final ATP tour event. I will not play any more Grand Slams or on the tour,” the tennis great said in a statement on Twitter.
“I have worked hard to return to full competitive form. But I also know my body’s capacity and limit. I am 41 years old and have played more than 1500 matches over 24 years. Tennis has treated me generously more than I ever would have dreamt and I must recognise when I have to end my competitive career. I will play more tennis, of course, but not in Grand Slams and in tour. It’s a bitter-sweet decision,” he added.
Only Spain‘s Rafael Nadal, with 22 majors, and Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, with 21, have more men’s Grand Slam singles titles than Federer.
As the issue of moonlighting or working elsewhere to make extra money in India is plaguing many tech giants after the Work From Home concession that entailed tech employees work remotely, several Indian tech giants are facing the challenge to keep their workforce committed and focused.
The ethical issue has been raised by tech services giant Infosys first, followed by cloud Major IBM on Wednesday. Infosys has already made it clear that the practice is not ethical and the company may fire those who are moonlighting.
However, no company has so far issued any framework to monitor its employees who are moonlighting as legally it is still daunting to gather evidence and withstand legal suits in courts. Secondly, the problem is not new in smaller and minor companies which have been struggling to pay higher wages to employees to retain them. Often, they blink to let the workforce work elsewhere in non-working hours.
Moreover, the issue is legally overwhelming for the companies as strict guidelines or framework of supervising or monitoring employees is often termed as violation of privacy rules in many courts and they may stand loose the legal battle even after firing such employees.
But the issue has already bogged down even major companies. Besides infosys, IBM Managing Director Sandip Patel said that the company’s position is exactly that of the overall industry in the country. “All of our workers when they are employed, they sign an agreement which says that they are going to be working full-time for IBM. So moonlighting is not ethically right for them to get into,” he said.
However, some startups are encouraging employees to opt for moonlighting or work outside their primary working hours. Swiggy has encouraged the practice but the traditional companies are calling it cheating and unethical and issued warning to employees from practising Moonlighting even in extra hours.
In one case, a techie who was interviewed by a Hyderabad-based company found that he hired another techie to work on his behalf, while he is engaged in working on other projects. He has been summarily fired now but the issue has brought to light the glaring anomaly in misuse of a pact with the company.
Infosys has already warned employees on Monday against moonlighting, saying that involvement in such practice can result in “disciplinary action including termination of employment”. “No two-timing, no moonlighting”, the company said in an internal memo, adding that it “strictly discourages dual employment”.
Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji recently said that the concept of a second job amounts clearly to “plain and simple” cheating. “There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple,” he emphasised.
Veteran Tollywood actor and former Union Minister U. V. Krishnam Raju was cremated with state honours near here on Monday.
Family members, friends, Tollywood celebrities and fans bid tearful adieu to Raju, who was popular as the ‘rebel’ star.
The last rites were performed in his farm house at Moinabad near Hyderabad.
Raju’s nephew ‘Bahubali’ star Prabhas, Jagapati Babu, and leaders of various political parties paid their last respects to Raju, who passed away on Sunday. Prabhas was seen assisting in the last rites.
Hyderabad:Veteran Tollywood actor Krishnam Raju dies at 83.
Earlier, Raju’s body was brought to Moinabad in a procession from his house at Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad.
As per the direction given by Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, authorities made arrangements for the cremation with state honours.
Police personnel presented a gun salute and opened fire in the air as a mark of respect to the departed soul.
Cyberabad police had made elaborate security arrangements for the funeral. Only those having permission from Raju’s family were allowed into the farm house.
Raju breathed his last at AIG Hospitals in Hyderabad on Sunday after prolonged illness. He was 83 and survived by wife and three daughters.
PM condoles demise of Veteran telugu actor, Krishnam Raju
In a career spanning 50 years, Krishnam Raju acted in more than 180 films.
Union Minister for Culture G. Kishan Reddy, Telangana minister K.T. Rama Rao, mega star Chiranjeevi, veteran actors Krishna, Murali Mohan, Mohan Babu, and Mahesh Babu were among those who paid their last respects to Raju on Sunday.
Singapore President Halimah Yacob conferred the prestigious Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) [Meritorious Service Medal (Military)] on Admiral Sunil Lanba (Retd), the former Chief of Naval Staff, Indian Navy. Dr Ng Eng Hen, Defence Minister of Singapore presented the award to Admiral Sunil Lanba (Retd), on behalf of the President, in a solemn Investiture Ceremony, held on 08 Sep 22 at the Ministry of Defence, Singapore.
The award is a recognition of strong bilateral defence ties between India and Singapore as well as stellar contribution of Adm Sunil Lanba to strengthen the engagements between the two Navies. During his tenure as the Chief of Naval Staff, the Indian Navy hosted the 25th edition of Singapore-India Maritime Bilateral Exercise (SIMBEX) at Visakhapatnam in Oct 2018. Adm Sunil Lanba (Retd) fondly recalled having hosted Dr Ng Eng Hen, Defence Minister of Singapore along with Rear Adm Lue Chuan Hong, the then Chief of Navy, Republic of Singapore Navy onboard INS Shakti for the concluding day of the Sea Phase of the Exercise. During the sea phase the Defence Minister of Singapore and other dignitaries witnessed, first hand, the level of interoperability achieved by the two Navies wherein high end operational manoeuvres including live missile firings were executed successfully by participating ships, aircraft and submarines of both navies.
Under the leadership of Adm Sunil Lanba, several milestone defence agreements were also signed between the two Navies, including the Bilateral Agreement on Navy Cooperation and Mutual Logistics Support Agreement. Adm Lanba also hosted the inaugural Goa Maritime Conclave in 2017, in which Singapore is one of the participants. During his term as the Chief of Naval Staff, Adm Lanba had attended the International Maritime Review (IMR) commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN), the International Maritime and Defence Expo (IMDEX) and the International Maritime Security Conference, co-hosted by the RSN alongside IMDEX-Asia in May 2017.
During his visit to Singapore to receive the Award, Adm Sunil Lanba (Retd) also held interactions with Lt Gen Melvyn Ong, Chief of Defence Force, Singapore Armed Forces and Rear Adm Aaron Beng, Chief of Navy, Republic of Singapore Navy. During these interactions, Adm Lanba complimented the leadership of Singapore for sustaining the momentum of bilateral engagements and shared views on new avenues of cooperation.
Rishi Sunak, who was defeated in the party leadership contest is not likely to be given any Cabinet berth, breaking from the tradition whereby most unsuccessful leadership contenders have been offered posts, reports said.
The newly elected Conservative leader Liz Truss will take the oath as the next UK Prime Minister on Tuesday. Liz Truss will be the third woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Rishi Sunak
Liz Truss defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 among party members. The announcements of the key ministerial portfolios are expected to be announced today by evening.
For the first time in Britain’s history, there will not be a white man in one of the four great offices of state, reports said
According to the British daily newspaper Guardian, James Cleverly may be appointed as foreign secretary, Suella Braverman as home secretary and Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor.
The expected appointments were welcomed by Boris Johnson’s former race adviser, Samuel Kasumu, who resigned last year after a controversial report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, Guardian reported.
Diabetes is an ailment that cannot curbed entirely but controlled. The patients of diabetes often experience spiking blood sugar levels due to insufficient insulin generated in the body.
While type-1 diabetes is visible since childhood, diabetes type-2 affects the middle aged people and mostly those in their 50s or 60s. In India too, it’s the most common disease affecting millions of people.
While doctors recommend a low-carbohydrate diet besides regular exercise and weight management to improve insulin sensitivity, some experiments have proved that onions can help reduce the diabetes.
The findings presented at the 97th annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2015 show that the extract of an onion can lower blood sugar levels. It was found more effective when given with the common diabetes drug metformin.
“Onion is cheap and available and has been used as a nutritional supplement,” said lead investigator Anthony Ojieh of Delta State University in Nigeria. “It has the potential for use in treating patients with diabetes.”
Ojieh and his colleagues gave metformin and varying doses of onion extract—200, 400 and 600 milligrams per kilograms of body weight daily to see if it would enhance the drug’s effect. Onion extract reportedly lowered the total cholesterol level in diabetic rats, with the two larger doses again having the greatest effects.
Also they found that the onion extract led to an increase in average weight among nondiabetic rats but not diabetic rats. Further, onion extract lowered cholesterol levels.
“Onion is not high in calories. However, it seems to increase the metabolic rate and, with that, to increase the appetite, leading to an increase in feeding,” Ojieh said.
However, for diabetes management, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Diet is a key and doctors suggest:
Consume daily lots of fruits and vegetables
Avoid carbs and sugar
Eat lean proteins such as chicken and fish
Take nuts and cereals frequently
Legumes and whole grains should be part of your daily diet.
[Disclaimer: Suggestions are for general information and should not be construed as professional medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your diet.]
Cyrus P. Mistry, 54, a scion of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group and former Chairman of Tata Group, was killed in a road accident in Palghar on Sunday afternoon, sending shock waves across the Mumbai circle of businesses and on the future of SP Group’s stake in Tata Sons.
He is survived by his wife, two children and a sister and an elder brother.
The last rites of Mistry, 54, who was killed in a road accident in Palghar on Sunday afternoon, shall be performed at the Worli Crematorium at 11 a.m. Tuesday, the mourning family said in a statement.
“Beloved husband of Rohiqa, father of Firoz and Zahan, son of the late Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry and Patsy Mistry, son-in-law of Iqbal and Roshan Chagla, brother of Laila Rustom Jehangir, Aloo Noel Tata and Shapoor Mistry,” said the family requesting “No condolence visits.”
Cyrus Mistry
The young business tycoon Mistry’s abrupt departure left the Indian corporate world shocked and has put the spotlight again on SP group’s substantial 18.37 per cent holding in Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata group.
The SP group had talked about separation in the past after a troubled relationship with Ratan Tata and media reports in March this year said the group was taking a Rs.15,000 crore loan against the holding in Tata Sons.
SP Group had talked about separation two years back in September 2020 before the Supreme Court, where the group pleaded that a separation from the Tata Group is necessary due to the potential impact this continuing litigation could have on livelihoods and the economy.
The SP-Tata relationship spanning over 70 years, was impacted by the ouster of Cyrus Mistry from the Chairman’s position at Tata Sons in 2016.
The boardroom coup was shrouded in mystery, forced cyrus Mistry take a long-running legal battle until the top court ruled in Tata’s favour.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding, accepted for publication in Nature, offers evidence that in the future Webb may be able to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.
WASP-39 b is a hot gas giant with a mass roughly one-quarter that of Jupiter (about the same as Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter. Its extreme puffiness is related in part to its high temperature (about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit or 900 degrees Celsius). Unlike the cooler, more compact gas giants in our solar system, WASP-39 b orbits very close to its star – only about one-eighth the distance between the Sun and Mercury – completing one circuit in just over four Earth-days. The planet’s discovery, reported in 2011, was made based on ground-based detections of the subtle, periodic dimming of light from its host star as the planet transits, or passes in front of the star.
Previous observations from other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, revealed the presence of water vapor, sodium, and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. Webb’s unmatched infrared sensitivity has now confirmed the presence of carbon dioxide on this planet as well.
NASA Prepares Webb Telescope /NASA
Filtered Starlight
Transiting planets like WASP-39 b, whose orbits we observe edge-on rather than from above, can provide researchers with ideal opportunities to probe planetary atmospheres.
During a transit, some of the starlight is eclipsed by the planet completely (causing the overall dimming) and some is transmitted through the planet’s atmosphere.
Because different gases absorb different combinations of colors, researchers can analyze small differences in brightness of the transmitted light across a spectrum of wavelengths to determine exactly what an atmosphere is made of. With its combination of inflated atmosphere and frequent transits, WASP-39 b is an ideal target for transmission spectroscopy.
First Clear Detection of Carbon Dioxide
The research team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) for its observations of WASP-39b. In the resulting spectrum of the exoplanet’s atmosphere, a small hill between 4.1 and 4.6 microns presents the first clear, detailed evidence for carbon dioxide ever detected in a planet outside the solar system.
“As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which undertook this investigation. “It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences.”
No observatory has ever measured such subtle differences in brightness of so many individual colors across the 3 to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum before. Access to this part of the spectrum is crucial for measuring abundances of gases like water and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many different types of exoplanets.
“Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial-sized planets,” said Natalie Batalha of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who leads the team.
Understanding the composition of a planet’s atmosphere is important because it tells us something about the origin of the planet and how it evolved. “Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,” said Mike Line of Arizona State University, another member of this research team. “By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet. In the coming decade, JWST will make this measurement for a variety of planets, providing insight into the details of how planets form and the uniqueness of our own solar system.”
Ghulam Nabi Azad dashed off his resignation letter not without blaming everything on 8 years of Rahul Gandhi’s leadership of Congress under whom he said proxies and puppets are propped up for the party president’s post.
Azad alleged that the senior leaders were abused, humiliated, insulted and vilified in a specially summoned meeting of the extended Congress Working Committee meeting after their G-23 group’s letter seeking reforms in the party in 2020, signed by 23 leaders.
In his resignation letter sent on Friday, Azad said, “Unfortunately, the situation in the Congress party has reached such a point of no return that now ‘proxies’ are being propped up to take over the leadership of the party. This experiment is doomed to fail because the party has been so comprehensively destroyed that the situation has become irretrievable. Moreover, the ‘chosen one’ would be nothing more than a puppet on a string.”
He said at the national level the Congress has conceded the political space to the BJP and state level space to regional parties. “This all happened because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the party,” he alleged without taking the name of Rahul Gandhi.
Congress
Azad alleged that in August 2020 when he and 22 other senior colleagues, including former Union Ministers and Chief Ministers wrote to Sonia Gandhi to flag the abysmal drift in the party, the “coterie” tried to “unleash its sycophants on us and got us attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible”.
The veteran leader alleged that on the directions of this coterie, today his mock funeral procession was taken out in Jammu and those who committed this indiscipline were feted in Delhi by the General Secretaries of the AICC and Rahul Gandhi personally.
“Subsequently the same coterie unleashed its goondas to physically attack the residence of a former Ministerial Colleague Sh. Kapil Sibal who incidentally was defending you and your kin in the courts of Law for your alleged attacks of omission and commission,” Azad wrote in the letter.
He said that the only crime committed by the 23 senior leaders, who wrote that letter out of concern for the party, is that they pointed out the reasons for the weaknesses in the party and the remedies too.
Adani Wilmar stock lost 3.86 per cent intraday to Rs 663 on Wednesday against the previous close of Rs 689.60 on BSE, on Tuesday when it closed 4.73 per cent lower from the previous close of Rs 723.85 on Monday.
Its market cap fell to Rs 87,338 crore on BSE. The stock has lost 24.57 per cent till date from record high amid debt trp warning by CreditSights.
Adani Group, deeply overleveraged with numerous investments in capital-intensive businesses could land in “masive debt trap”, warned CreditSights, a Fitch Group’s debt research unit on Tuesday.
Currently, the conglomerate’s total debt is pegged at 2.3 trillion rupees ($28.80 billion). The conglomerate’s debt-funded growth plans could culminate in distress or default of its companies and impact the broader Indian economy in a “worst-case scenario”, the unit said.
Adani group debt trap warning
Shares in Adani Group companies including flagship Adani Enterprises, Adani Green Energy, Adani Ports, and Adani Power fell soon after the release of the report.
Shares of Adani Green, up about 170% in the last one year fell by 6.9%. Adani Power, which has seen five-fold increase in share price fell 5% on Tuesday.
The grim assessment comes at a time its group companies are investing in new sectors such as news media, telecom, cement and long-term infra projects.
As the interest rates are going up again, the heavy debt of the Adani companies may pose a risk due to the long gestation period of some infrastructure projects, CreditSights said in its report.
Another fact the research unit cited was “high key-man risk” in Gautam Adani’s absence as the management structure may find it inadequate to deal with.
The popular Galileo manuscript at the University of Michigan Library was found to be a forgery, as per an investigation by the University authorities, after a historian flagged it. Based on the watermarks, they realized that it was no more than a century old and not from 1609 as claimed.
“It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo,” admitted Donna L. Hayward, the interim dean of Michigan’s libraries.
Caption: A handwritten manuscript believed to be the original work of astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1609 turned out to be a modern forgery (Image credit: University of Michigan Library)
The university was donated the piece in 1938 by a trustee Tracy McGregor, purportedly authenticized by Cardinal Pietro Maffi (1858-1931), the Archbishop of Pisa.
The manuscript was a replica of a rough draft by Galileo about the telescope, his new invention as a letter to the Doge of Venice in 1609. The final version is available in the State Archive in Venezia, Italy. It talks about the moons of Jupiter that Galileo found and wrote in his letter.
Credit for discovering the forgery goes to historian Nick Wilding who found the watermark odd and sought a probe. The university found it a forgery three months later and admitted it to the public. They’re suspecting that it was done a notorious forger from Italy by name Tobia Nicotra.
Actually, the watermark on the paper belonged to a post-1770 paper mill company, while Galileo wrote the letter in 1609. “It just kind of jumps out as weird,” Wilding told the NY Times.
Even though they often enhance happiness, acts of kindness such as giving a friend a ride or bringing food for a sick family member can be somewhat rare because people underestimate how good these actions make recipients feel, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.
The study by UT Austin McCombs School of Business Assistant Professor of Marketing Amit Kumar, along with Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, found that although givers tend to focus on the object they’re providing or action they’re performing, receivers instead concentrate on the feelings of warmth the act of kindness has conjured up. This means that givers’ “miscalibrated expectations” can function as a barrier to performing more prosocial behaviors such as helping, sharing or donating.
To quantify these attitudes and behaviors, the researchers conducted a series of experiments.
In one, the researchers recruited 84 participants in Chicago’s Maggie Daley Park. Participants could choose whether to give away to a stranger a cup of hot chocolate from the park’s food kiosk or keep it for themselves. Seventy-five agreed to give it away.
Researchers delivered the hot chocolate to the stranger and told them the study participant had chosen to give them their drink. Recipients reported their mood, and performers indicated how they thought recipients felt after getting the drink.
Performers underestimated the significance of their act. They expected recipients’ mood at an average of 2.7 on a scale of -5 (much more negative than normal) to 5 (much more positive than normal), while recipients reported an average of 3.5.
“People aren’t way off base,” Kumar said. “They get that being kind to people makes them feel good. What we don’t get is how good it really makes others feel.”
The researchers also performed a similar experiment in the same park with cupcakes. They recruited 200 participants and divided them into two groups. In the control group, 50 participants received a cupcake for participating. They rated their mood, and the other 50 people rated how they thought the receivers felt after getting a cupcake.
For the second group of 100, 50 people were told they could give away their cupcake to strangers. They rated their own mood and the expected mood of the cupcake recipients. The researchers found that participants rated cupcake recipients’ happiness at about the same level whether they got their cupcake through an act of random kindness or from the researchers. What’s more, recipients who received a cupcake through an act of kindness were happier than control group recipients.
“Performers are not fully taking into account that their warm acts provide value from the act itself,” Kumar said. “The fact that you’re being nice to others adds a lot of value beyond whatever the thing is.”
In a lab experiment, Kumar and Epley added a component to assess the consequences of kindness. Participants first either received a gift from the lab store or were gifted one by another participant, then played a game. All participants who received an item were told to divide $100 between themselves and an unknown study recipient.
The researchers found that recipients who received their lab gift through another participant’s random act of kindness were more generous to strangers during the game. They divvyed up the $100 more equally, giving away $48.02 on average versus $41.20.
“It turns out generosity can actually be contagious,” Kumar said. “Receivers of a prosocial act can pay it forward. Kindness can actually spread.”
Recent study shows that during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the proportion of working-aged UAmerican adults without health insurance did not change despite increases in unemployment, and the prevalence of unhealthy behaviors decreased.
The findings, published by Wiley online in CANCER, studied individuals with and without a history of cancer. While cancer survivors often have high health care needs, they are more vulnerable to the effects of economic and health care disruptions, as happened during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
File Photo of Johns Hopkins Covid-19 map
Xuesong Han of the American Cancer Society, and her colleagues used data from the nationwide, population-based Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System—an annual household telephone survey—to examine changes in multiple health-related measures in 2020 among cancer survivors.
Among adults aged 18–64 years, the uninsured rate did not change significantly in 2020 despite huge job cuts. The prevalence of unhealthy behaviors, including sleeplessness and smoking decreased in 2020, and health improved, regardless of cancer history, showed the analysis.
Declines in smoking were greater among cancer survivors than among adults without a cancer history, it noted. “Our findings suggest that the pandemic may have motivated people to adopt certain healthier behaviors, and national and regional policy responses to the pandemic regarding insurance coverage, unemployment benefits, and financial assistance may have contributed to the observed positive changes,” said Han.
Refuting the rumors that Russian President Vladimir Putin is fighting cancer, the Kremlin has stoutly denied such reports once again.
The Kremlin routinely rejected any speculation about Putin’s health. Last week, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin felt “fine” and in “good health” before describing speculation to the contrary as “nothing but hoaxes”.
But the US intelligence community believes that Putin is suffering and he’s being treated for cancer, according to an assessment by the Newsweek. “Putin is definitely sick,” an official from the office of the Director of National Intelligence told the outlet, while noting, whether he’s going to die soon is “mere speculation”.
Two other officials, one from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a retired Air Force officer, also claimed to have access to a comprehensive intelligence assessment of Putin’s health, and said the outlook for the Russian leader is bleak, according to the report.
Missing from world stage
The assessment supports the theory that Putin was missing from the world stage for much of April because he was undergoing treatment for advanced cancer, the report said.
“Is Putin sick? Absolutely,” the retired Air Force officer said. “But we shouldn’t let waiting for his death drive proactive actions on our part. A power vacuum after Putin could be very dangerous for the world.”
The intelligence community also reportedly believes that Putin is increasingly paranoid about his hold on power and that he may have survived an assassination attempt in March.
File photo: The Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi formally welcomes the President of Russian Federation, Mr. Vladimir Putin to the BRICS Summit venue, in Goa on October 16, 2016.(PIB Photo)
“Putin’s grip is strong but no longer absolute,” one of the senior intelligence officers said. “The jockeying inside the Kremlin has never been more intense during his rule, everyone sensing that the end is near.”
The officials also warned that as Putin has become increasingly isolated, access to credible intelligence has become more difficult to obtain. “One source of our best intelligence, which is contact with outsiders, largely dried up as a result of the Ukraine war,” the senior DIA official said, noting that as Putin has fewer meetings with foreign leaders, there are fewer opportunities to learn about his condition.
Meanwhile, CIA Director Bill Burns merely said at the Aspen Institute’s annual security confab that Putin is “entirely too healthy”. He further said the rumors didn’t constitute “a formal intelligence judgment.” But asked directly if Putin was unhealthy or unstable, he said: “There are lots of rumours about President Putin’s health and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy.”
Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has distanced himself from the January 6 Capitol Hills insurrection and his father-in-law Donald Trump in his new book titled “Breaking History”, as the Congressional committee’s investigations on Trump’s alleged role began.
‘Breaking History’ is the latest memoir from a Trump administration official, this one from the former president’s son-in-law who also served as senior adviser in the White House and on his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
The book, trashed by the New York Times, said he was flying back to Washington, D.C., from Saudi Arabia when he got a call from attorney Eric Herschman saying rioters had stormed the Capitol. But Kushner’s assessment of the riot, which led to multiple deaths and scores of injuries, is that the White House could not have known there would be violence on that day.
Jared Kushner, married to the Trump’s favourite daughter Ivanka Trump, also distances himself from the events of January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol to try to stop Congress’ Electoral College vote count of the 2020 election results.
“The violent storming of the Capitol was wrong and unlawful. It did not represent the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters, or the tens of millions of Trump voters, who were good, decent and law-abiding citizens,” Kushner wrote, according to media reports.
“What is clear to me is that no one at the White House expected violence that day. I’m confident that if my colleagues or the president had anticipated violence, they would have prevented it from happening,” he said.
Kushner’s assessment that nobody in the White House expected there to be violence on January 6 stands in stark contrast with the findings of the House committee.
The book highlights a number of rivalries Kushner had with other administration officials, most notably former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former chief of staff John Kelly, among others.
As the UK government is gearing up for self-driving cars from next year with a 100 million pound ($118 million) investment, vehicles with self-driving features will become a common sight by 2025.
The government is planning a new legislation which will allow for the safe wider roll-out of self-driving vehicles by 2025. “This enables the UK to take full advantage of the emerging market of self-driving vehicles — which could create up to 38,000 jobs and could be worth an estimated 42 billion pounds,” the UK government said in a statement.
The government’s vision for self-driving vehicles will also include 34 million pounds for research to support safety developments and prepare a more detailed legislation taking into consideration the possible performance of self-driving cars in poor weather conditions. Also how they interact with pedestrians, other vehicles, and cyclists will be looked into.
The government has confirmed 20 million pounds, as part of the overall 100 million pound, to help kick-start commercial self-driving services and enable businesses to grow and create jobs in the UK, following an existing 40 million pound investment.
The government said that self-driving vehicles could revolutionise public transport and passenger travel, especially for those who do not drive, better connect rural communities and reduce road collisions caused by human error. In future, these could be extended to provide tailored on-demand links from rural towns and villages.
Both the Bhartiya Kisan Union-Tikait (BKU-Tikait) and the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) have announced that they will hold a 75-hour sit-in at Rajapur Krishi-Utpadan Mandi Samiti in Lakhimpur Kheri from Thursday to seek justice for those killed in October violence last year.
On Oct. 3, 2021, when protesters were walking on the road in Lakhimpur Kheri, they were hit and ran over from behind by a speeding SUV car and two other vehicles in a row. The protesters torched the vehicles and killed three of its occupants, while the driver of the third car fled the site. Eight people, including four farmers, were killed in the violence that erupted soon after.
Their other demands include the withdrawal of cases registered against them during the stir against the Centre’s now-withdrawn farm laws, compensation to families of farmers who died during the year-long protest and legal guarantee for the minimum support price of crops.
Bhudev Sharma, national organisation secretary of BKU-Tikait, said the farmers would demand dismissal of Union minister of state for home Ajay Kumar Mishra ‘Teni’ in connection with Tikunia violence of October 3, 2021, in which his son Ashish Mishra is the key accused.
Other demands
He added their demands also included withdrawal of cases against the four farmers, who are in jail in connection with their alleged involvement in the Tikunia violence case. Already, farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and various other parts of Uttar Pradesh have started arriving in Lakhimpur to participate in the demonstration.
Apart from BKU national president Naresh Tikait and national spokesperson Rakesh Tikait, Darshan Singh Pal, Joginder Singh Ugrahan, Yogendra Yadav and other leaders of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha will participate in the sit-in.
Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the recently discovered Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars less than 3% the age of our solar system that stretches across one-third of the sky.
The planets were discovered in TESS images taken between October and December 2018. Follow-up studies of TOI 451 and its planets included observations made in 2019 and 2020 using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which has since been retired, as well as many ground-based facilities.
Archival infrared data from NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) satellite – collected between 2009 and 2011 under its previous moniker, WISE – suggests the system retains a cool disk of dust and rocky debris. Other observations show that TOI 451 likely has two distant stellar companions circling each other far beyond the planets.
A paper reporting the findings was published on Jan. 14 in The Astronomical Journal. Stellar streams form when the gravity of our Milky Way galaxy tears apart star clusters or dwarf galaxies. The individual stars move out along the cluster’s original orbit, forming an elongated group that gradually disperses.
Elisabeth Newton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, who led the research, said: “It’s only 120 million years old and just 400 light-years away, allowing detailed observations of this young planetary system. And because there are three planets between two and four times Earth’s size, they make especially promising targets for testing theories about how planetary atmospheres evolve.”
This illustration sketches out the main features of TOI 451, a triple-planet system located 400 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
In 2019, a team led by Stefan Meingast at the University of Vienna used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to discover the Pisces-Eridanus stream, named for the constellations containing the greatest concentrations of stars. Stretching across 14 constellations, the stream is about 1,300 light-years long. However, the age initially determined for the stream was much older than we now think.
Astronomers expect planets as big as these to retain much of their atmospheres despite the intense heat from their nearby star. Different theories of how atmospheres evolve by the time a planetary system reaches TOI 451’s age predict a wide range of properties.
“By measuring starlight penetrating a planet’s atmosphere at different wavelengths, we can infer its chemical composition and the presence of clouds or high-altitude hazes,” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “TOI 451’s planets offer excellent targets for such studies with Hubble and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.”
As astronomers are looking for a hypothetical “Planet Nine” in our solar system, an exoplanet 336 light years from Earth is looking more like the Planet Nine of its star system.
Planet Nine, potentially 10 times the size of Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun, was proposed in 2012 to explain perturbations in the orbits of dwarf planets beyond Neptune’s orbit, so-called detached Kuiper Belt objects. However, it has yet to be found, if ever it exists.
A similarly weird extrasolar planet was discovered far from the star HD 106906 in 2013 was much heavier than the predicted mass of Planet Nine at probably 11 times the mass of Jupiter, or 3,500 times the mass of Earth. And it was located in an unexpected location, far above the dust plane of the planetary system and tilted at an angle of about 21 degrees.
It is not known whether the planet, HD 106906 b, is in an orbit perpetually bound to the binary star — which is 15 million years old compared to the 4.5 billion-year age of our sun or on its way out of the planetary system, never to return.
In a paper published on Dec. 10, 2020, in the Astronomical Journal, astronomers answer that question. By precisely tracking the planet’s position over 14 years, they determined that it is likely bound to the star in a 15,000-year, highly eccentric orbit, making it a distant cousin of Planet Nine.
If it is in a highly eccentric orbit around the binary, “This raises the question of how did these planets get out there to such large separations,” said Meiji Nguyen, a recent UC Berkeley graduate and first author of the paper. “Were they scattered from the inner solar system? Or, did they form out there?”
According to senior author Paul Kalas, University of California, Berkeley, the resemblance to the orbit of the proposed Planet Nine shows that such distant planets can really exist and that they may form within the first tens of millions of years of a star’s life. “Something happens very early that starts kicking planets and comets outward, and then you have passing stars that stabilize their orbits,” he said.
What makes HD 106906 unique is that it is the only exoplanet that we know that is directly imaged, surrounded by a debris disk, misaligned, and widely separated, Nguyen said. “This is what makes it the sole candidate we have found thus far whose orbit is analogous to the hypothetical Planet Nine.”
Aamir Khan’s much awaited movie Laal Singh Chaddha that was initially headed for a Christmas 2020 release has now been shifted to Christmas 2021 due to delays with the ongoing pandemic and its adverse effects on most anticipated movies.
Aamir Khan has a long standing association with Christmas. All his movies released during Christmas have been super successful, be it 3 Idiots, PK, Dhoom 3, Dangal and more. His latest movie, Laal Singh Chaddha which is based on Tom Hanks ‘Forrest Gump, has already shot a few parts in Chandigarh and Kolkata before the nationwide lockdown was implicated. While the situation in the country remains to be crucial, the actor is recently in Turkey to do recce for the movie.
Ever since the makers dropped the first look of Aamir as a Sikh man fans went berserk over it. Keeping the current scenario in mind, Aamir and makers have announced a new release date and shifted it from this december to next December as the movie deserves a grand release.
Viacom 18 studio presents Aamir Khan productions’ Laal Singh Chaddha stars Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan in the lead and Mona Singh in a pivotal role. It is adapted by Atul Kulkarni and is directed by Advait Chandan. The music is by Pritam and lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya.
