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Archives for 2018

Bodies of 14 newborn babies found at Kolkata ground

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In a shocking incident, at least 14 dead bodies of newborn babies, wrapped in plastic bags, were recovered from a deserted ground in south Kolkata’s Haridebpur on Sunday, police said.

Covered with shrubs and twigs, the bodies were found on Sunday afternoon while the sprawling ground was being cleaned up.

The ground has been sealed by the officials of Kolkata Police following the recovery.

City Mayor Sovan Chatterjee and Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar rushed to the spot.

“I was informed by the local councillor that the ground was filled with litters for many months and needed to be cleaned. While the cleaning work was on, 14 dead bodies of new born babies could be recovered from one side of the ground. The bodies were wrapped in plastic and chemical was applied to stop them from rotting,” Chatterjee said.

“The police are keeping a strict vigil on the spot. The entire ground needs to be cleaned to ascertain the exact number of bodies that have been dumped here.”

The police are still figuring out how the bodies were dumped on the empty ground.

(IANS)

Indian gets suspended jail term, deportation order for forgery

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An Indian man has received a suspended jail term along with a deportation order for forging a parking ticket in Dubai.

The Court of First Instance heard that the 25-year-old Indian made a fake copy of a ticket using Photoshop to avoid paying for the parking lot. He was caught in Al Rafaa following the incident in March, the Khaleej Times reported on Sunday.

He received a suspended jail term along with a deportation order. The man admitted to the police that he copied an original Roads and Transport Authority ticket and placed the forged one on his car.

Myanmar jails 2 Reuters reporters for 7 years

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Two Reuters reporters were jailed on Monday for seven years for violating a state secrets act during their reporting of the Rohingya crisis, a court said, in the case that has drawn outrage for its attack on media freedom.

The two journalists were being tried since 2017 for breaching Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act while investigating violence against the Rohingya Muslims in the Rakhine state by the army, the BBC reported.

Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested on the night of December 12, after meeting with two police officers who, according to the defendants, handed them confidential documents, the Efe news reported.

Since then, both have been held without bail and have appeared 30 times before the court, which started a preliminary investigation on January 9 and formally filed charges on July 9.

The case has been widely seen as a test of press freedom in Myanmar.

The journalists have maintained their innocence, saying they were set up by the police.

“I have no fear,” Lone, 32, said after the verdict. “I have not done anything wrong. I believe in justice, democracy and freedom.”

The two men, who both have families with young children, have been in prison since their arrest in December 2017.

“Today is a sad day for Myanmar, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and press freedom anywhere,” said Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler.

Judge Ye Lwin told the court in Yangon the pair had “intended to harm the interests of the state”. “And so they have been found guilty under the state secrets act,” he said.

Lone and Soe Oo, 28, had been collecting evidence about the execution of 10 men by the army in the village of Inn Din in northern Rakhine.

During their investigation, they were offered the documents by two police officers, but were arrested immediately afterwards for the possession of those documents.

Authorities later launched their own probe into the killings, confirming the massacre took place and promising to take action against those who had taken part.

The BBC said that many would see this verdict as a crushing blow to freedom of the press in Myanmar and another setback for the democracy, three years after Aung San Suu Kyi’s party triumphed in free elections.

He said Lone and Soe Oo bowed their heads as the verdict was delivered. Wa Lone – who has missed the birth of his first child while being detained — protested his innocence once again as he was led away.

“We are extremely disappointed by this verdict,” Britain and the US have said, saying the court’s decision was “deeply troubling for everybody who has struggled so hard here for media freedom”.

The UN’s resident and humanitarian co-ordinator in Myanmar Knut Ostby said the UN had “consistently called for the release” of the journalists and that “a free press is essential for peace, justice and human rights for all. We are disappointed by today’s court decision”.

“The outrageous convictions show Myanmar courts’ willingness to muzzle those reporting on military atrocities,” Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.

“These sentences mark a new low for press freedom and further backsliding on rights under Suu Kyi’s government.”

The verdict comes a year after the crisis in Rakhine state came to a head when a Rohingya militant group attacked several police posts. The military responded with a brutal crackdown against the Rohingya minority.

The UN has said leading army figures in Myanmar should be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.

Media access to Rakhine is strictly controlled by the government so it is difficult to get reliable news from the region.

Equity indices cede major gains to trade flat

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Mumbai The key Indian equity indices traded on a flat-to-positive note during the afternoon session on Monday, after opening sharply higher on the back of healthy April-June GDP figures released last week.

The indices trimmed major gains made earlier in the day, due to weak Asian markets. Globally, Asian markets traded in the negative territory on concerns of escalations in the US-China trade war.

According to analysts, healthy buying was witnessed in consumer durables, healthcare and IT stocks.

At 1.08 p.m., the wider Nifty50 on the National Stock Exchange traded at 11,684.75 points, higher by 4.25 points or 0.04 per cent from its previous close of 11,680.50 points.

The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex, which had opened at 38,915.91 points, traded at 38,666.18 points, higher by 21.11 points or 0.05 per cent from its previous close of 38,645.07 points.

So far, it has touched an intra-day high 38,934.35 points and a low of 38,655.66 points.

The BSE market breadth, however, remained bullish with 1,576 advances and 919 declines.

The top gainers on the Sensex were, Wipro, Sun Pharma, Adani Ports, Reliance Industries, Infosys while Hindustan Unilever, Maruti Suzuki, Kotak Mahindra Bank, NTPC and ICICI Bank were the major losers so far.

[IANS]

Massive search operation on in J&K’s Pulwama

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Security forces started a massive search operation on Monday in around two dozen villages of Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, police said.

The operation began following reports about the presence of militants in the villages of Putrigam, Rohmu, Rajpora, Matrigam, Goosu, Frasipora and others.

“So far, there has been no reports of any exchange of fire in any of the villages included in the search,” a police officer said.

This is not the first such operation in the south Kashmir area undertaken by the security forces.

These operations known as area domination operations are usually undertaken to keep the militants on the run and prevent them from establishing a foothold in the region.

Stones pelted at MP CM

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Stones were hurled at Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s chariot while he was conducting the ‘Jan Aashirwad Yatra’ in Sidhi district, police said on Monday.
The incident occurred in Churhat area late on Sunday in the assembly constituency of Congress’s Ajay Singh. “The miscreants hid in the dark and pelted stones,” Bhartiya Janta Party state media cell chief Lokendra Parashar said.

Parashar and the BJP have accused the Congress for the attack, while the Congress refuting it have blamed Chouhan’s own party for staging the attack to malign Singh’s name.
The Chief Minister on Monday dared the Congress leader to come out in the open and fight him.

Rejecting this, Singh said: “The Congress does not follow the culture of violence. I suspect that it is a well-planned conspiracy hatched to defame me and the people of Churhat.”

(IANS)

Microsoft redesigning Skype for mobile, desktop

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San Francisco, Microsoft is redesigning Skype’s interface for both mobile and desktop, eliminating the less used features on the app and simplyfying its core functions like voice calling, video chatting and messaging.

“This past year, we explored some design changes and heard from customers that we overcomplicated some of our core scenarios,” Peter Skillman, Director of design for Skype and Outlook wrote in a blog post.

The redesign concentrates on decluttering the mobile app interface and shifting chats, calls, contacts and notifications options to the top left of the window, providing a central navigation point for desktop users.

Microsoft is also removing the “Highlights” feature which was added to Skype last year and was inspired by photo-messaging app Snapchat. It allowed users to post a thread of photos and videos for friends to view and react to with emoticons.

“Calling became harder to execute and ‘Highlights’ didn’t resonate with a majority of users. We needed to take a step back and simplify,” wrote Skillman.

The video-and-voice platform would now also come with light and dark theme options to choose from.

“We toned down the visual range of the gradients and re-introduced a simplified Skype ‘Classic’ blue theme-adjusted for contrast and readability,” Skillman added.

More updates, focussing around calling, chats and contacts would be rolling out in the months to come, the post noted.

Microsoft has also reportedly rolled out end-to-end encryption for private conversations on Skype that would ensure that the chat content between two people is hidden in both, the chat list and the notifications.

[IANS]

Congress leads in Karnataka civic polls vote count

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The Congress was ahead by 52 seats by winning in 814 civic body seats across the state, while the BJP has won in 762 seats as of 11.45 a.m., according the results declared by the SEC on its website.
So far, results were declared in 2,171 seats of the total 2,709 where the ULB election was held on August 31.

The Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) has so far won in 300 seats while Independents took another 265 seats, as of 11.45 a.m.

Polling took place across the 2,633 wards of the state, spread over 29 city municipalities, 53 town municipalities and 23 town panchayats and in 135 wards of the three city corporations.

A record average of 67.5 per cent voter turnout was registered across the state for the civic polls.

In all, 8,340 candidates, including 2,306 from the Congress, 2,203 from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and 1,397 from the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) are in the fray for the ULBs, while 814 contested from the city corporations, including 135 from Congress, 130 from BJP and 129 from JD-S.

In the event of a party not getting majority on its own in the election, Congress and JD-S have decided to forge a post-poll alliance to keep BJP out of power, similar to May 12 state Assembly election which threw up a hung verdict, a JD-S official told IANS earlier.

In the 2013 ULB elections held in 4,976 seats, the Congress had won 1,960 seats, while BJP and JD-S had won 905 seats each, while Independents bagged the remaining 1,206 seats

(IANS)

Facebook AI significantly improves Urdu to English translation

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San Francisco Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers at Facebook have set a new record in improving translation from Urdu to English.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is the field concerned with using AI to do translations in any language.

The team from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) has seen a dramatic improvement in its results, the Forbes reported on Saturday.

“To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points,” the team said in a paper that described translation from Urdu to English.

Facebook AI researchers seek to understand and develop systems with human-level intelligence by advancing the longer-term academic problems surrounding AI.

The research covers the full spectrum of topics related to AI, and to deriving knowledge from data: theory, algorithms, applications, software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure.

“Long-term objectives of understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines are bold and ambitious, and we know that making significant progress towards AI can’t be done in isolation,” said researchers from FAIR.

FAIR researchers have tested a new approach that teaches bots how to chit-chat like humans.

Facebook is making deep investments in AI technology and in May announced the next version of its open-source AI framework for developers.

Microsoft is currently leading when it comes to AI and Deep Neural Networks to improve real-time language translation.

Earlier this year, Microsoft brought machine learning to improve language translation for Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.

With Deep Neural Networks-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and the sound more natural.

[IANS]

26-year-old Hyderabad-born filmmaker is the latest worldwide sensation

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Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better for Asians in Hollywood after the fluke, tempestuous (and not-entirely-deserved, I might add) success of the seasons’s big blockbuster, “Crazy Rich Asians” — a film that features only actors of Asian origin — yet another Asian filmmaker has taken the global boxoffice by storm.

And this time, we Indians have a lot to be proud of. While “Crazy Rich Asians” doesn’t even have a token Indian representation in its cast or crew (though I did catch a Sardarji valet in a hotel driveway shot), the new thriller, released just a week after “Crazy…”, is directed by the Indo-American filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty, whose roots are in Hyderabad. Chaganty worked for a couple of years at Google before gravitating to full-time filmmaking.

His stunning directorial debut, “Searching”, is set in the cyber universe where a distraught father attempts to locate his missing daughter.

Interestingly, Chaganty, who grew up on a staple diet of Bollywood and Hollywood films, pitched “Searching” to the studios as an eight-minute short film. The producers suggested Chaganty turn it into a full-length feature film. The director initially declined the offer, arguing that he didn’t want to stretch a good idea beyond a point.

However, Chaganty did finally make “Searching” as a feature film. Released on August 24, the film, made on a shoestring budget with Korean star John Cho in the lead, has already established Chaganty as a filmmaker to reckon with. The ultimate compliment for this small-budgeted blockbuster came from the “Crazy Rich Asians” crew when they booked an entire theatre to watch the film.

The young filmmaker names Manoj Night Shyamalan as his main influence. No doubt Chaganty’s thriller-noire approach to cinema makes him the new “Night” among Indo-American filmmakers. I fervently hope Chaganty’s career doesn’t follow Shyamalan’s trajectory.

There was a time after “The Sixth Sense” when Shayamalan, who likes to be called “Night”, was seen as the brightest filmmaker from India in Hollywood. And then it all fell apart, film by film.

“Unbreakable”, which followed “The Sixth Sense”, was received fairly. But soon after, Shayamalan rapidly declined into the night with “Signs” (2002), “The Village” (2004), “The Lady In Water” (2006), “The Happening” (2008) and, worst of all, the 3D abomination “The Air Bender”, which, apart from other atrocities, also revealed Dev “Slumdog” Patel to be an extremely inept actor. To be honest, one thought “The Air Bender” to be a kind of closure on Shyamalam’s career as a spook merchant. We thought it couldn’t get any worse.

But it did.

In how many more ways could Shyamalan tell the same “Sixth Sense” story over and over again? The eerie has become progressively dreary in his oeuvre.

I remember just before the release of “The Happening” (not happening at all), I asked Shyamalan why his career lost momentum after “Sixth Sense”.

Protesting loudly, the filmmaker said: “I hear this a lot in India. It feels like everyone is five years behind. You can’t judge my career by the box office alone.”

Agreed, but I do hope Aneesh Chaganty remembers that being the new Shyamalan doesn’t mean that you turn blind to reality. Night can never be described as day.

(IANS)

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