Monday, 4 March 2019
CBSE board exam results 2019 to be declared by May 10 this year
Results for both grades are usually announced in the third week of May. 'The board took the decision of announcing results by May 10 this year, following an order from the Delhi High Court. We want to make sure that by the time students take admission in colleges in June or if students change schools then they should have the final documents including the mark sheet and examination certificate,' added the official. This year, 43,411 students from Uttarakhand are appearing for class 10 board examinations and 38,795 for class 12 board examinations across 156 centres. For better transparency and security of the examination process, the regional office has also appointed 15 deputy city coordinators along with 32 city coordinators. With this move, the official added that compartment examinations will also be conducted early compared to previous years. Dailyhunthttps://able2know.org/user/kunvindsee/
Sensex soars 265 points as new F&O series opens strong
On the macro-economic front, however, traders might take a cautious look at country's economic growth slowing down to a 5-quarter low of 6.6 per cent in October-December period, analysts said. Economic growth estimate for the current fiscal year ending March 31 has been revised downwards to 7 per cent from the earlier estimate of 7.2 per cent. This is the lowest growth in the last five years. Overall sentiments meanwhile turned upbeat on chances of de-escalation of tension with Pakistan, brokers said. Unabated buying by foreign institutional investors (FIIs) also supported, they said. Reflecting the bullish mood, all sectoral indices of BSE led by metal, bankex and IT were in the positive zone, rising by up to 0.95 per cent. The NSE Nifty jumped 76.65 points, or 0.71 per cent, to 10,869.15. Shares of Vedanta Ltd on the top among Sensex components, rising 2.74 per cent, while Yes Bank gained 1.60 per cent. Other gainers include Tata Motors, Infosys, Hero MotoCorp, NTPC, ICICI Bank, Tata Steel, TCs, Maruti Suzuki, HDFC Bank, Kotak Bank, HUL, HDFC Ltd, Bajaj Finance, SBI, RIL, Coal India, L&T and ITC Ltd, rising up to 1.18 per cent. Brokers said investors were busy in creating new positions following the beginning of the March futures and options (F&O) series that led to the rally in the market. Meanwhile, on a net basis, FIIs bought shares worth Rs 3,210.6 crore, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) sold shares worth Rs 5,240.62 crore on Thursday, provisional data showed. A firming trend in the rest of Asia also accelerated buying activities. Japan's Nikkei quoted 0.89 per cent higher while Hong Kong's Hang Seng gained 0.31 per cent in the early part. China's Shanghai Composite Index too up bhy 0.22 per cent and Straits Times gained 0.40 per cent. The US Dow Jones ended 0.27 per cent lower on Thursday. Dailyhunthttps://www.openlearning.com/u/kunvinsinghs
Second coldest March day in last 27 years
'Since 1992, the lowest day temperature recorded in March was 19 degrees Celsius. It was recorded on March 2, 2015. Saturday was the coldest day in four years and second coldest since 1992 (the year till which data is available),' said a senior official of the IMD. Even though the day temperature has plunged, the night temperature, which had dropped to a 40-year-low on Friday shot up from 6.8 degrees Celsius to 13 degrees Celsius on Saturday. 'Rain, an overcast sky and strong winds, triggered by a western disturbance helped the day temperature to dip,' said a senior official. The IMD's observatory at Safdarjung, which is taken to be a representative of Delhi's weather, recorded around 2.6 mm rain between Friday morning and Saturday evening (till 5:30 pm). On a clear day, the day temperature shoots up because of the sun. At night, the heat is radiated and the temperature drops. On a cloudy day however, the day temperature drops because of the absence of the sun's rays. The heat does not get radiated at night because of the clouds and the nights get warmer. 'Conditions are likely to remain the same on Sunday - a cloudy sky, rain and strong winds. The sky is expected to clear up from Monday,' said the official. Even though IMD has forecast that there could be another dip in the mercury levels once the western disturbance passes, officials said that the dip won't be drastic and the night temperature is expected to remain around 10 degrees Celsius. Earlier in 2018, Delhi had witnessed the third coldest December in 50 years. IMD data showed that the average monthly minimum temperature in December 2018 was 6.7°C. In 2005, the average minimum temperature was 6.0°C, and 1996, the average minimum temperature was 5.9°C. The IMD had forecast a warmer winter this time due to the influence of El Nino over the Pacific Ocean. Dailyhunthttps://anotepad.com/notes/gfrwrp
Supreme Court proposal: re-appoint ex-judges
"The collegium's request is under consideration at the highest level but no decision has been taken yet," a ministry source said.Sources in the Supreme Court said the Chief Justice had sent the letter around the last week of January and that the Centre had been sitting on the file for more than a month.Some sources said the adverse reports levelled charges of corruption and professional misconduct against 60-odd candidate judges. The reports had stalled any appointments to these two high courts (or their previous avatar as the undivided Andhra Pradesh High Court) since September 2017.Andhra Pradesh High Court has just 11 judges while Telangana High Court has 13, with more than half their sanctioned judges' posts vacant. Each has a backlog of 1.3 lakh cases.It's the chief justice or acting chief justice of a high court who recommends candidates for elevation to that court, pending clearance from a three-member Supreme Court collegium. Before clearing a candidate, the collegium seeks the views of apex court or high court judges who have earlier served in the high court where the appointment is to be made. This "consultee judge" opinion is received in the form of internal notes.Also, members of the bar association of the state concerned can on their own give their feedback on any of the candidate judges to the collegium."Whenever the collegium receives a recommendation (for one of these two high courts), it's immediately followed by objections from apex court judges who had earlier worked in that high court," a source said.Although the views of consultee judges are not binding, the opposition has prompted the collegium - made up of Chief Justice Gogoi and Justices A.K. Sikri and S.A. Bobde - to suggest the extraordinary remedy of Article 224A, the source said.The undivided high court was bifurcated only on January 1 this year. Hyderabad remains the principal seat for Telangana High Court while Andhra Pradesh High Court is now based in Amaravati. 1682282 Dailyhunthttps://justpaste.it/1nnop
Donald Trump symbolically tightens embargo on Cuba
Some of the businesses on the list are hotels operated as joint ventures with foreign companies, but the Trump administration measure does not allow the foreign companies themselves to be sued, a State Department official told reporters on condition of anonymity. Every president since Bill Clinton has suspended a section of the 1996 Helms-Burton act that would allow such lawsuits because they would snarl companies from U.S.-allied countries in years of complicated litigation that could prompt international trade claims against the United States. Along with carving out a small exception to Title III of the act, the Trump administration said it would only be suspended for 30 days, raising the prospect of more biting sanctions in the future. The Cuban government called that an "unacceptable threat against the world." "I strongly reject the State Department's announcement to authorize lawsuits under Title III of the Helms-Burton act, against a list of Cuban companies arbitrarily sanctioned by the Trump administration," Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said on Twitter. Major investors in Cuba include British tobacco giant Imperial Brands, which runs a joint venture with the Cuban government making premium cigars; Spanish hoteliers Iberostar and Melia, who run dozens of hotels across the island; and French beverage-maker Pernod-Ricard, which makes Havana Club rum with a Cuban state distiller. "It is not intended to affect European companies that are currently doing business in Cub," the State Department official said. "You could not sue a European or Japanese partner in a joint venture." Attorneys for Americans with claims on confiscated properties said the Trump decision to announce an extremely limited partial lifting of Title III of the Helms-Burton act may itself be illegal because it violates their clients' rights to sue. "If this is the first step in a strategic effort that will lead to full enforcement of US law, it may be a good first step," said attorney Jason Poblete, who represents a group of Americans whose property was confiscated. "However, partial waivers are not mentioned in the statute and it raises potential equal protection and maybe other constitutional questions." The measure is being presented as retaliation for Cuba's support of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who the U.S. is trying to oust in favor of opposition leader Juan Guaido. "Today expect the United States to take the first in a series of steps to hold the regime in #Cuba accountable for its 60 years of crimes & illegality which includes its support for the murderous #MaduroCrimeFamily," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio wrote on Twitter. "Justice is coming. And more to come." After nearly 60 years of trade embargo, the Cuban economy is in a period of consistently low growth of about 1 percent a year, with foreign investment at roughly $2 billion, far below what it needs to spur more prosperity. But tourism, remittances and subsidized oil from Venezuela have allowed the government to maintain basic services and a degree of stability that appears unshaken by the Trump administration's recent moves against Cuba and its major remaining allies in Latin America - Venezuela and Nicaragua. Dailyhunthttp://www.tichytraingroup.com/ActivityFeed/MyProfile/tabid/57/UserId/13896/Default.aspx
Delhi's dreamcatcher: Anamika Haksar on films, penury and making it to Sundance
What it's about The film got its name, Haksar says, via one of her aunts. 'She told me an anecdote about hailing a tonga driver who had an emaciated horse. He refused to take her, saying he had to feed his horse jalebis.' The combination of ironic humour, a fading tradition of tongawallahs, a poorly fed horse and an impoverished driver who had probably not had a jalebi himself in months, got to her, she says. Born to Kashmiris settled in Shahjanabad, she says the cultural oasis of Old Delhi had always fascinated her. 'So many migrants from so many regions of the country, surviving together.' It took over seven years to make Ghode Ko Jalebi…, which traces the lives and dreams of beggars, pickpockets, street singers, hawkers and rickshaw pullers in Old Delhi. A still from Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, which combines documentary footage, animation and folk art to tell of the dreams and nightmares of Old Delhi's beggars, pickpockets, hawkers and rickshaw pullers. The film weaves a tapestry of the real and fantastical, its documentary footage overlaid with animation and paintings based on folk styles. The dreams are cryptic, charged, emotional. A pickpocket dreams of Mickey Mouse in a remand home. In a vendor's nightmares, he sees his children in his village home burning. Why dreams? 'The narrative moves from moment to moment, there is no particular storyline. The structure of the film mirrors the winding streets and lives of the homeless, who don't have a structured life and who don't know what will happen next.' Haksar says she picked these characters because they are generally seen as types, or tasks, rather than individuals. She created a list of about 25 questions — on fears, imagery, dreams, oft-felt emotions, attitude to money, daily routines. Actors Gopalan and Ravindra Sahu play a labourer-activist and a pickpocket respectively. 'I handed the questionnaire to a theatre colleague of mine who lives in old Delhi because it's better to do it that way than to just descend on people from the outside. We spoke to 75 people over two years,' she says. Based on the answers to her questionnaire, she created her four key characters — a pickpocket, played by theatre actor Ravindra Sahu, a snacks vendor played by actor Raghuvir Yadav, a labourer-activist played by theatre actor Gopalan and a conductor of heritage walks played by playwright and actor Lokesh Jain. Making it Her crew greatly informed how the film turned out, Haksar stresses. 'I took an eight-month course in filmmaking and I had the direction part under control. But I didn't know about things like lensing, or how to place the camera,' she says. 'There were political issues too. There was a woman on the streets. She had been raped 10 times. Where do you place your camera when you show her? My cinematographer, Saumyananda Sahi, is a very conscious person. He prioritised her dignity over the idea of a good shot.' 'This film takes a lot of risks and pushes the frontiers of Indian cinema. Haksar has used animation and magic realism to tell a story that is humanist in intent, backed by years of research. It's wonderful that festivals are supporting such work, because this is not a film that would otherwise easily find a theatrical release,' says Meenakshi Shedde, film curator and South-Asia consultant for the Berlin film festival. Gautam Nair, the sound designer, used ambient sound only; nothing was dubbed in a studio. Sundance will bring the film the attention it so desperately needs, Haksar says. 'I'm broke. I can't even afford to put up some screens and hire some projectors so that the people in my movie — these people who live on the streets of Old Delhi — can watch it. Sundance is a huge honour and it may help me get a theatrical release for the film too.' Already, the film has been screened at this year's Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and has won a best debut director award at this year's International Film Festival of Kerala. But so far, only two of the people she interviewed have seen it. 'One works with me,' Haksar says. 'The other is a domestic worker who is very vocal. She said, 'Didi yeh normal toh nahi hain. Thodasa hatke hain. Par hamare baare mein hain aur sachchai hain isme. (It's not a regular film. It's different. But it's about us and there is truth in it)'.' the trailer here: Dailyhunthttps://www.openstreetmap.org/user/keedenjaars
Fighting fake news: Decoding 'fact-free' world of WhatsApp
In the fact-free world of WhatsApp, though, it didn't matter: these fake images went viral. A similar-looking fake image of ABP news was then circulated in pro-Congress groups to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP): 'Modi busted: 70 thousand crores rupees uncovered in Modi's Swiss Bank account. BJP stirred'; 'BJP caught in one lakh crore rupees scam, CBI reveals'. Again, it was fake news. Fake news that goes viral Variants of these fake ABP news images were the second most shared misleading images in over two thousand politics-focussed and public WhatsApp groups that we monitored in the run-up to the 2018 assembly elections—offering a peek into the themes that dominated the 'fake news' ecosystem. This example perfectly represents the three key things we identified about visual misinformation in our dataset. First, newspaper clippings and television news screen grabs — real or fake — were extensively shared. Second, anti-Congress misleading content aims to create confusion about Rahul Gandhi's religiosity (to show him as non-Hindu) and portray Congress as an anti-Hindu party. Third, anti-BJP misinformation is targeted to show Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP as corrupt. From outright falsehoods and partially-true misleading narratives to bigotry and hate, everything is circulated in the closed encrypted world of India's most popular messaging application, with over 230 million active users. According to a 2017 Lokniti-CSDS Mood of the Nation (MOTN) survey, around one-sixth of WhatsApp users in India said they were members of a group started by a political leader or party. Not all political discussion on WhatsApp is about consuming fake news. Our dataset — over a million messages collected from politically-motivated WhatsApp groups between 1st August and 4th December 2018 — has all kinds of information: long crafted text messages, infographics, political memes, and news videos. The focus of this analysis is restricted to the study of images—36% of all messages; 9% were videos. Data collected from 'public' WhatsApp groups WhatsApp is a black box for content: It is nearly impossible to comprehensively track misinformation in the WhatsApp sphere as the content is end-to-end encrypted and no one can — and should not — access private conversations at scale. Given this restriction, we decided to monitor 'public' WhatsApp groups that are open to the public, meaning anyone can join these through links publicised on the internet. They constitute a small sample of the hundreds of thousands of groups that parties and their supporters have created to disseminate political information. We do not claim that public groups represent the discussion in private groups. But in absence of any other data, our research offers a window to understanding the themes that political actors or their supporters want to promote and distribute. Methodology We manually classified each WhatsApp group in our dataset with its party affiliation: of the total, we identified 693 pro-BJP groups; 156 pro-Congress; and the rest voice support for various regional parties and religious groups. To be sure, it is not known how many of these groups are managed by the office-bearers of political parties, though there is some evidence of centralisation. For instance, around 400 groups in our database were created by just 10 phone numbers. Overall, 1,49,305 people were members of the groups we monitored. 79,781 members (53% of all members) sent at least one message; 31,459 (21%) shared at least one image. We analysed all the images in our dataset by programmatically grouping similar-looking ones into clusters using an image hashing algorithm. Then, we manually reviewed the top 2,000 clusters (each had at least five images), together comprising around 67,000 images, and identified the misleading content in this data set. We used the shortlisted images to qualitatively study the most shared misleading images and derived the themes that dominated the fake news ecosystem in the run-up to the recent assembly elections. Here are our three key findings: Screen grabs, news clippings to fill trust deficit Seven of the ten most shared misleading images in the pro-BJP WhatsApp groups were media clippings. The most shared image was a screengrab of a primetime segment of Times Now, an English TV news channel, claiming that the Congress party manifesto in Telangana was Muslim-centric. Seven 'Muslim only' schemes were included in the manifesto, the image claimed, including a scholarship for Muslim students and free electricity to Mosques. Except that the information was misleading. Alt News, a left-leaning fact-checking news website, later debunked how the news channel had misreported the story, by selectively picking parts of the manifesto to create a false narrative. This message repeatedly appeared in various forms — eight of the top ten misleading images in the BJP groups were only about the manifesto — including screen grabs from CNBC-Awaaz, another news channel, and standalone graphics. The example illustrates a key point: 'fake news' as commonly understood has various shades. Unlike the morphed ABP news screenshots (second most shared) that propagated outright lies, the Telangana manifesto story is based on partially-true information that was later found to be misleading. The intent in the latter case is not clear and often difficult to establish. Why are there so many media clippings? One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that WhatsApp -ers leverage mainstream media artefacts to compensate for the declining credibility of WhatsApp content. A limited small-scale survey conducted last year across 14 Indian states by Digital Empowerment Foundation revealed that rural Indians don't trust messages on WhatsApp blindly, indicating a lack of trust in content received on the messaging service. We have seen that before: Prior to 2018 Karnataka elections, fake opinion polls attributed to the BBC were circulated in both BJP and Congress groups, each publicising dubious survey numbers to showcase victory for their own side. Anti-Congress fake news: communal propaganda Communal polarisation was the major theme of anti-Congress misinformation in our dataset: it aims to establish that the Congress party only cares about Muslims. The Telangana manifesto was one such example. Then there is bigotry, with messages that ask people to connect the dots and rethink whether Rahul Gandhi is actually a Hindu by questioning the religiosity of his ancestors. The narrative begins with Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and Gandhi's great-grandfather. 'By education, I'm an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and a Hindu only by accident of birth,' reads a quote attributed to Nehru in a newspaper clipping. Nehru never said this. The next target in line is Feroz Gandhi, husband of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi's grandfather. The messages repeat the long-standing false rumour that Feroze Gandhi was a Muslim, in contrast with the well-documented fact that he belonged to a Parsi family. Then, questions are raised about the marriage of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, his parents: 'Mother and father got their marriage registered in Delhi church as a Christian couple. Son claims himself as a janeu dhari Hindu. Can there be a bigger joke?' reads one message. A fact-check by SMHoaxSlayer revealed that this claim is simply wrong. Another says: 'How can a son of a Parsi man and Christian woman be a Hindu? Have you ever thought about this?' These rumours have been a part of the political discourse for long and are constantly fed to Indian citizens. Put this into the political context and the signal is clear: the strategy to portray Congress as an anti-Hindu party, a theme BJP has leveraged to mobilise the Hindu electorate and consolidate the vote in their favour. In fact, various images shared in the groups we monitored make an explicit call for Hindus to unite to defeat the Congress. Anti-BJP fake news: Modi and BJP are corrupt Anti-BJP fake news attempts to show the Narendra Modi and his party as corrupt. Clippings tagged with an organisation called 'News Express' — it is not clear who runs this organisation, and if there is any real organisation with that name — ran a headline saying: 'Rafale scam: Former President of France Francois Hollande says PM Narendra Modi is a thief.' Hollande never said this. Other fake clippings make similar claims: 'RBI accepts that demonetisation was a wrong decision. It is a nine lakh crore rupees scam,' reads an image post, attributing the statement to Urjit Patel, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. 'Modi government is the most corrupt government in Asia, says Forbes magazine' 'India goes bankrupt, according to a shocking disclosure by the World Bank. India owes 1,31,000 million dollars' None of this is true. Steps taken by WhatsApp On its part, WhatsApp has taken several measures in the last year: it took out full-page ads in Indian newspapers to fight misinformation, has started labelling forwarded content and limited the number of forwards to five messages only. In February, the company said it has communicated to Indian political parties that WhatsApp 'is not a broadcast platform', 'not a place to send messages at scale' and accounts that 'engage in automated bot behaviour' will be banned. Globally, it has deleted two million accounts per month for the past three months on that account. The steps are expected to add friction to use of the messaging platform by political actors, but it is unlikely to contain misinformation itself: the stream of messages and the activity in India's WhatsApp groups will just explode in the coming months. (Samarth Bansall is a New Delhi-based data journalist. Kiran Garimella is a Post doctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Dean Eckles, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tarun Chitta helped with data collection) Dailyhunthttp://www.tripntale.com/profile/138009
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