Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday (July 28) honoured Mithali Raj for her contribution towards Indian cricket. The CM also announced cash prize of Rs 1 crore and a 600 square yard house plot to the Indian women's cricket team captain. The house plot would be given to her in posh Banjara Hills area in Hyderabad.
Earlier, reports in the media claimed that Raj wasn't given a plot of land promised by the erstwhile government.
(CNN)The House voted Thursday to approve a spending bill with $1.6 billion to put toward a border wall along the US-Mexico border, part of a high-profile campaign pledge from President Donald Trump.
Despite Trump's pledge to make Mexico pay for the wall, the bill earmarks taxpayer money to construct a carrier along the southwest border. To avoid having those Republicans who oppose the measure vote on it directly House Republican leaders tucked it into a procedural measure that set the debate plan for the so-called "minibus" funding bill for several federal agencies.
The bill passed 235-192 mostly along party lines.
The wall funding was added to a measure that combined funding bills for the Pentagon, energy and water, legislative branch, military construction and Veterans Affairs.
The $658 billion defense spending legislation was $27 billion more than Trump's budget request, and would provide the military additional fighter jets, ships, helicopters and troops that the Pentagon had requested.
While the wall funding was the most contentious piece of the appropriations bill, it was just a small sliver of the spending package the House approved.
The defense spending bill also conforms to the House's budget outline, but it violates the Budget Control Act spending caps commonly known as sequestration. The Senate is not planning to give the military the same level of funding unless the caps are lifted, which would require congressional action.
Senate Democrats are demanding equal increases to domestic and military spending in any funding agreement, a debate that will heat up closer to the October 1 deadline for Congress to fund the government.
Islamabad: Nawaz Sharif stepped down as the Prime Minister of Pakistan minutes after the country's highest court unanimously disqualified him for life after an investigative panel found his family's wealth was far above their earnings in the Panama Papers case.
The development was confirmed by Pakistan Prime Minister's spokesperson.
In a devastating verdict, the top court also ordered criminal cases be opened against Sharif and his family.The five-judge bench ruled that the Prime Minister had been dishonest to Parliament and the courts and could not be deemed fit to hold office.
The Attorney General said that the bench disqualified the Prime Minister for life.Justice Ejaz Afzal Khan, who headed the implementation bench, said all material collected by the Joint Investigation Team would be sent to an accountability court within six weeks.
He said cases should be opened against Maryam Nawaz (Sharif's daughter), Captain Muhammad Safdar (Maryam's husband), Hassan and Hussain Nawaz (PM Sharif's sons) as well as Prime Minister Sharif and a judgement should be announced within 30 days.
The five-judge bench -- including Justices Asif Saeed Khosa, Gulzar Ahmed, Sheikh Azmat Saeed, Ijazul Ahsan, besides Ejaz Afzal Khan --- announced the much-awaited verdict in Courtroom No. 1 of the Supreme Court in Islamabad.
The court also urged President Mamnoon Hussain to take charge of the country's affairs.
This is the third time that Nawaz Sharif has been unable to complete his term in office. It was unclear who will be appointed to take over the post till the next general elections, scheduled for 2018.
The bench also disqualified Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and Captain Safdar, who is an Member of the National Assembly, from office.
Sharif, who became Prime Minister for the third time in 2013, had earlier denied wrongdoing and had warned that his ouster would destabilise Pakistan at a time when the economy was rebounding after a decade of political and security chaos. Sharif was the country's 20th Prime Minister.
The son of an industrialist, Sharif saw both of his first two stints in power cut short in the 1990s, including in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999.
It is notable that not a single Prime Minister in Pakistan has been allowed to complete his or her tenure since the country's inception 70 years ago.
The political situation in Pakistan has been bumpy ever since 1947, with four democratically elected governments thrown away by military dictators, one Prime Minister was murdered while another was hanged by the judiciary, and another dismissed by the Supreme Court.
At Jef Boeke's lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here.
Scientists have long been able to make specific changes in the DNA code. Now, they're taking the more radical step of starting over, and building redesigned life forms from scratch. Boeke, a researcher at New York University, directs an international team of 11 labs on four continents working to "rewrite" the yeast genome, following a detailed plan they published in March.But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks of man-made DNA.
Their work is part of a bold and controversial pursuit aimed at creating custom-made DNA codes to be inserted into living cells to change how they function, or even provide a treatment for diseases. It could also someday help give scientists the profound and unsettling ability to create entirely new organisms.
The genome is the entire genetic code of a living thing. Learning how to make one from scratch, Boeke said, means "you really can construct something that's completely new."
The research may reveal basic, hidden rules that govern the structure and functioning of genomes. But it also opens the door to life with new and useful characteristics, like microbes or mammal cells that are better than current ones at pumping out medications in pharmaceutical factories, or new vaccines. The right modifications might make yeast efficiently produce new biofuels, Boeke says.
This Tuesday, April 25, 2017 photo shows a a petri dish containing live yeast cultures at a New York University labe at the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York, where researchers are attempting to create completely man-made, …more
Some scientists look further into the future and see things like trees that purify water supplies and plants that detect explosives at airports and shopping malls.
Also on the horizon is redesigning human DNA. That's not to make genetically altered people, scientists stress. Instead, the synthetic DNA would be put into cells, to make them better at pumping out pharmaceutical proteins, for example, or perhaps to engineer stem cells as a safer source of lab-grown tissue and organs for transplanting into patients.
Some have found the idea of remaking human DNA disconcerting, and scientists plan to get guidance from ethicists and the public before they try it.
Still, redesigning DNA is alarming to some. Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University, a bioethicist who's been following the effort, is concerned about making organisms with "properties we cannot fully know." And the work would disturb people who believe creating life from scratch would give humans unwarranted power, she said.
"It is not only a science project," Zoloth said in an email. "It is an ethical and moral and theological proposal of significant proportions."
In this Tuesday, April 25, 2017 photo, yeast cultures are stored in a freezer in a New York University lab at the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York, where researchers are attempting to create completely man-made, custom-built …more
Rewritten DNA has already been put to work in viruses and bacteria. Australian scientists recently announced that they'd built the genome of the Zika virus in a lab, for example, to better understand it and get clues for new treatments.
At Harvard University, Jeffrey Way and Pamela Silver are working toward developing a harmless strain of salmonella to use as a vaccine against food poisoning from salmonella and E. coli, as well as the diarrhea-causing disease called shigella.
A key goal is to prevent the strain from turning harmful as a result of picking up DNA from other bacteria. That requires changing its genome in 30,000 places.
"The only practical way to do that," Way says, "is to synthesize it from scratch."
The cutting edge for redesigning a genome, though, is yeast. Its genome is bigger and more complex than the viral and bacterial codes altered so far. But it's well-understood and yeast will readily swap man-made DNA for its own.
In this Tuesday, April 25, 2017 photo, NYU School of Medicine Professor Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Jef D. Boeke speaks during an interview in his office at the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York, …more
Still, rewriting the yeast genome is a huge job.
It's like a chain with 12 million chemical links, known by the letters, A, C, G and T. That's less than one-hundredth the size of the human genome, which has 3.2 billion links. But it's still such a big job that Boeke's lab and scientists in the United States, Australia, China, Singapore, and the United Kingdom are splitting up the work. By the time the new yeast genome is completed, researchers will have added, deleted or altered about a million DNA letters.
Boeke compares a genome to a book with many chapters, and researchers are coming out with a new edition, with chapters that allow the book to do something it couldn't do before.
To redesign a particular stretch of yeast DNA, scientists begin with its sequence of code letters—nature's own recipe. They load that sequence into a computer, then tell the computer to make specific kinds of changes. For example one change might let them rearrange the order of genes, which might reveal strategies to make yeast grow better, says NYU researcher Leslie Mitchell.
Once the changes are made, the new sequence used as a blueprint. It is sent to a company that builds chunks of DNA containing the new sequence. Then these short chunks are joined together in the lab to build ever longer strands.
In this Tuesday, April 25, 2017 photo, post doctoral fellow Leslie Mitchell, works at her bench at a New York University lab in the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York, where researchers are attempting to create completely …more
The project has so far reported building about one-third of the yeast genome. Boeke hopes the rest of the construction will be done by the end of the year. But he says it will take longer to test the new DNA and fix problems, and to finally combine the various chunks into a complete synthetic genome.
Last year, Boeke and others announced a separate effort, what is now called Genome Project-write or GP-write . It is chiefly focused on cutting the cost of building and testing large genomes, including human ones, by more than 1,000-fold within 10 years. The project is still seeking funding.
In the meantime, leaders of GP-write have started discussions of ethical, legal and social issues. And they realize the idea of making a human genome is a sensitive one.
"The notion that we could actually write a human genome is simultaneously thrilling to some and not so thrilling to others," Boeke said. "So we recognize this is going to take a lot of discussion."
Late Thursday night, Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX’s next big rocket — the Falcon Heavy — will make its inaugural flight this November. It’s a new launch date for a vehicle that has had many tentative launch dates before, none of which have actually panned out just yet. But perhaps this time, the vehicle may finally fly when Musk says it will.
The Falcon Heavy is a larger variant of SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rocket. It consists of three Falcon 9 cores strapped together, and will be capable of lofting around 140,000 pounds of cargo into lower Earth orbit. That will make it one of the most powerful rockets in history once it launches. And just like the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy will be partially reusable. All three cores are intended to return to Earth and land after launch, in order to be used again for future missions. In fact, SpaceX intends to use two used Falcon 9 cores that have already flown to space as the side boosters for this first flight.
Yet this first flight was supposed to happen years ago. Originally, the Falcon Heavy was meant to debut sometime in 2013 or 2014, but its maiden voyage has been continuously pushed back since then. In 2015, the company said the rocket would launch in spring of 2016. That didn’t happen, and SpaceX eventually pushed the launch to sometime in late 2016. Then in September of last year, one of the company’s rockets exploded on a Florida launch pad, and the Falcon Heavy’s first flight was put on hold yet again. SpaceX keeps saying the flight will happen this year, and now Musk has set the target month.
But signs actually point to the rocket flying this year, though. In May, SpaceX showed off a video of the core Falcon Heavy booster undergoing a static fire test; that’s when the vehicle’s engines are turned on while the rocket is restrained. And pictures of SpaceX’s hangar at Cape Canaveral, Florida seem to suggest all three rockets that will make up the Falcon Heavy are already on site. Once the rocket is fully integrated, SpaceX plans to launch the vehicle from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center — a launch site once used for Apollo and Shuttle missions that SpaceX leases from NASA.
However, even if the Falcon Heavy gets off the ground in November, it may not be a very smooth flight, since engineering the vehicle turned out to be way more challenging than originally thought. At a conference this July, Musk noted that combining three Falcon 9 cores together actually triples the amount of vibrations and acoustics the rocket will experience during launch. Because of that, the company had to restructure the center core to handle the new loads. Plus, SpaceX has only been able to test the three boosters separately up until now. But all three rockets — adding up to 27 engines — will need need to ignite simultaneously for the Falcon Heavy to fly. It’s something the company has never tried before and doesn’t quite know what to expect.
Given all these challenges, Musk lowered expectations about how successful this first flight might be. He doubted the Falcon Heavy would make orbit and even suggested it may not get very far at all. “I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage,” said Musk. “I would consider even that a win, to be honest.”
The last of the traditional iPods that lacked internet connectivity are gone. Apple has quietly taken down the websites for both the iPod nano and iPod shuffle today. As of now, searching for the products still results in “learn more” and “buy” links, but they lead to URLs that are no longer available. An Apple spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that both products have met their end and are now officially discontinued. Apple has long maintained that the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch would ultimately cannibalize its traditional music player hardware. The iconic iPod classic was discontinued in 2014.
"Today, we are simplifying our iPod lineup with two models of iPod touch now with double the capacity starting at just $199 and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano,” the spokesperson said by email. The iPod touch now comes in 32GB and 128GB storage options, with the latter priced at $299. The previous 16GB and 64GB capacities are no longer available.
You should still be able to find some remaining iPod shuffle and nano units from Best Buy and other authorized retailers until stock runs out.
The iPod nano hasn’t been significantly updated since 2012, when the company redesigned it with Bluetooth support for wireless headphones and speakers. Apple released a new batch of colors for that seventh-generation model in 2015. The clip-on iPod shuffle last saw a redesign with the fourth-gen model in 2010, which made a quick return to physical controls after the poorly received third-generation model of 2009. Since then, Apple has updated the color options from time to time — just like the nano.
Chinese smartphone manufacturerMeizuis all set to launch its flagship smartphoneMeizu Pro 7 Plusat an event in China tomorrow (July 27). Just ahead of the launch, a new leak has surfaced online revealing all the specifications of the smartphone.
As per the image leaked onWeibo, the Meizu Pro 7 Plus will sport a 5.7-inch QHD display and will be powered by MediaTek Helio X30 processor. The rear of the device will house a secondary display along with dual rear cameras. The smartphone will have two 12MP cameras at the back with RGB and monochrome sensors. It will also have a 16MP front camera for selfies. The device will runAndroid7.0 Nougat operating system based on the Flyme OS of the company. The smartphone will offer 6GB of RAM and will incorporate company's 25W mCharge tech which will offer fast charging to the device.
Recently, Meizu launched the M5 smartphone in India at Rs 10,499. The smartphone sports a 5.5-inch HD display with 720x1280 pixel resolution. Powering the device is an octa-core MediaTek processor coupled with 2GB/3GB of RAM. It offers 16GB/32GB of internal storage which can be further expanded up to 128GB through a mciroSD card.
The hybrid dual-SIM handset runs theYun OS5.1 topped with Meizu's Flyme UI. The smartphone features a 13MP rear camera dual-tone LED Flash, PDAF, f/2.2 aperture and 5P lens. A 5MP front camera for selfies is also included. The device carries an mTouch 2.1 fingerprint sensor embedded into the home button. Backing the device is a 3,070 mAh battery.
The outspoken former Jammu and Kashmir CM described the arrest of eight separatist leaders for receiving funds from Pakistan to fan unrest in the Valley as a good move.
Her minister write speech for Syed Ali Shah Geelani, claims Abdullah
3
Arrest of separatist leaders a good move, ex J&K CM says.
Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah today launched his biggest attack on incumbent Mehbooba Mufti yet accusing her of being hand-in-glove with Hurriyat.
"People's Democratic Party has won because of Hurriyat. Their stronghold lies in South Kashmir. There lies the answer. Ask the government to probe this," he said.
"She (Mehbooba) is hand-in-glove with Hurriyat. One of her ministers write the statements that (separatist leader Syed Ali Shah) Geelani give," Abdullah added.
Talking to India Today, Farooq Abdullah said it was no surprise that reports suggested that the Jammu & Kashmir Police stalled the movement of arrested separatist leaders from Srinagar to Delhi on Monday evening. High drama is alleged to have played out at the airport, as the seven arrested were being moved by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), because the state government was upset it wasn't kept in the loop about the arrests. It was only after the Ministry of Home Affairs intervened that the NIA could carry forth with its job.
"You should hold the government of Kashmir and the chief minister responsible for this. The BJP should break up with them," said Farooq Abdullah.
The outspoken former Jammu and Kashmir CM described the arrest of eight separatist leaders for receiving funds from Pakistan to fan unrest in the Valley as a good move but expressed doubt that when the NIA goes after the big fish - Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik - they would find it easy.
"It is a very good development. We all we know where is the money coming from," Abdullah said.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested top separatist leaders days after an India Today expose. India Today's investigation revealed how these Kashmiri separatists were receiving funds from Pakistan to trigger trouble in the region.
While seven separatist leaders were arrested on Monday , Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party (JKDFP) president Shabir Shah was held late on Tuesday.
In May, the NIA had visited Srinagar to probe into the alleged funding by Pakistan for illegal activities in Kashmir, and questioned separatist leaders regarding their involvement in raising, collecting and transferring funds through Hawala and other channels for terror funding in Kashmir.
Hurriyat leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani are already under house arrest while Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Yasin Malik is also under arrest
The officials said initial reports showed
one of the Chinese J-10 aircraft came close to the US EP-3 plane on
Sunday, causing the American aircraft to change direction.
Two
Chinese fighter jets intercepted a US Navy surveillance plane over the
East China Sea over the weekend, with one coming within about 300 feet
(91 meters) of the American aircraft, two US officials told Reuters on
Monday.
The officials said initial reports showed one of the
Chinese J-10 aircraft came close to the US EP-3 plane on Sunday, causing
the American aircraft to change direction. The persons spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak
publicly on the matter.
One of the officials said the Chinese jet
was armed and the incident took place 80 nautical miles (148 km) from
the Chinese city of Qingdao.
Incidents such as Sunday's intercept are not uncommon.
In
May, two Chinese SU-30 aircraft intercepted a US aircraft designed to
detect radiation while it was flying in international air space over the
East China Sea.
China is deeply suspicious of any US military activity around its coastline.
Ram Nath Kovind, 71, is second Dalit President after KR Narayanan to walk into the 340-room Rashtrapati Bhavan. | WATCH LIVE
Ram Nath Kovind took oath as India's 14th President today. Kovind was sworn-in by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar at the Central Hall of Parliament House.
Ram Nath Kovind, 71, is second Dalit President after KR Narayanan to walk into the 340-room Rashtrapati Bhavan. Kovind defeated Congress-led Opposition's candidate former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar by a handsome margin of 65.2 per cent votes.
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CJI KS Khehar arrives at Parliament House for swearing-in ceremony.
Chief Justice of India JS Khehar arrives at Parliament House to administer oath of office to President-elect Ram Nath Kovind. (Photo: India Today/Supriya Bhardwaj)
Ram Nath Kovind meets outgoing President Pranab Mukherjee.
The new president will leave for Rashtrapati Bhavan where an inter-services guard of honour will be given to him in the forecourt and courtesies will be extended to the outgoing president.
Thereafter, the outgoing President Pranab Mukherjee will give Kovind a tour of the official residence - the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
The swearing-in event is likely to get over by 12:36 PM when the new president and Pranab Mukherjee would proceed towards Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Ahead of the oath taking ceremony, Kovind will visit Rajghat, Mahatma Gandhi's memorial on the banks of Yamuna river.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who broke ranks with the Opposition to support NDA candidate Ram Nath Kovind, is also likely to attend the event.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, Vice President Hamid Ansari, Union Ministers, senior BJP leaders, chief ministers of several states will be attending Kovind's swearing-in ceremony.
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