Weekly Update: October 19, 2020 - October 23, 2020

I slept and i dreamed that life is all joy.
I woke and i saw that life is all service.
I served and i saw that service is joy.
-Kahlil Gibran
(January 06, 1883 - April 10, 1931; Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist)

Let's start!

Did you know, that cats have fewer toes on their back paws? Cats have four toes on their back paws, while they have five toes on their front paws.

Image Credit: https://www.humanesociety.org/

Many scientists believe that four toes on their back paws help them to run faster.

October 19, 2020 (Monday)
:::The number of Corona Cases were:
Confirmed - 75,50,273
Recovered - 66,63,608
Deceased - 1,14,610

:::A study conducted by Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology found that Indus Suture Zone (ISZ), a tectonic fault line that runs all along the Indus river from China through India & Pakistan, is not inactive as it was previously considered. The tectonic fault line runs through Ladakh, and it is moving northward.

Image Credit: https://www.civilsdaily.com/

The study was conducted in Ladakh from the north Leh to the Tso Moriri Lake and it covered a distance of 213 kilometers.

:::Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) lifted ban on TikTok after the management of the company assured that it will block all the accounts that are involved in spreading obscenity and immorality. PTA issued a formal statement and said that it was open to discussions with TikTok if it was willing to moderate unlawful content.

Image Credit: https://www.opindia.com/

TikTok was banned in Pakistan for failing to filter out the immoral & indecent content, and PTA lifted the ban after ten days.

:::Pashchimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Limited (PVVNL) launched power supply disconnection drive in Gautam Buddha Nagar District, and recovered around ₹3.64 crore from 1,778 consumers. Virendra Nath Singh, Chief Engineer at PVVNL, said that the disconnection drive was being undertaken to snap electricity connections of nearly sixty-thousand consumers that had not cleared their dues despite repeated reminders.

Image Credit: http://pvvnl.org/

PVVNL recently decided to regularly inspect electricity meters of heavy load connections, which is the main reason for mounting Aggregate Technical & Commercial (AT&C) loss.

October 20, 2020 (Tuesday)
:::The number of Corona Cases as reported on Aarogya Setu App were as follows:
Confirmed - 75,97,063
Recovered - 67,33,328
Deceased - 1,15,197

:::Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, a constituent laboratory of Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), started the cultivation of asafoetida (hing) for the first time in India. The first seed was planted on October 15, 2020 at a farmer's field in Kwaring village of Lahaul valley in Himachal Pradesh.

Image Credit: https://parenting.firstcry.com/

India currently imports approximately twelve-hundred tonnes of raw asafoetida from Afghanistan, Iran & Uzbekistan, and it costs the country around ₹730 crore.

:::The first case of Covid-19 induced Acute Demyelinating Syndrome, brain nerve damage that led to the blurred vision of an eleven years young girl, was reported in All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi. The condition of the girl improved with immunotherapy and she was discharged after she gained about 50% of her vision. Dr. Sheffali Gulati, Chief at Child Neurology Division, said that they plan to publish this case report soon.

Image Credit: https://medicaldialogues.in/

Corona Virus may adversely affect the long-term neuro-developmental outcome of Covid-19 positive children, and they may need a regular follow-up treatment. Children who tested Covid-19 positive are also known to suffer from epilepsy, encephalitis, kawasaki-like disease and guillain-barre syndrome, to name a few.

:::Bahrain's Salwa Eid Naser, a twenty-two years young athlete who ran the third fastest time ever when she won World Athletics Championship 400m gold in 2019, got cleared of an anti-doping violation. She was banned in July, 2020, for failing to provide her whereabouts for the surprise dope tests three times within a year. Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) said that the charges for missed tests and filing failures were dismissed by an independent tribunal.

Image Credit: http://ibctime.com/

Salwa Eid Naser will now compete at Tokyo Olympics that is scheduled to start from July 23, 2021.

October 21, 2020 (Wednesday)
:::The number of Corona Cases were:
Confirmed - 76,51,107
Recovered - 67,95,103
Deceased - 1,15,914

:::OSIRIS-REx, NASA's spacecraft, briefly touched Bennu, an asteroid that is 321 million kilometers away from Earth, after orbiting around it for two years. The spacecraft will collect dust & pebbles from the surface of the asteroid and deliver it to Earth in the year 2023. Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at NASA, said that a lot of things could go wrong because the spacecraft is about the size of a van, and the asteroid has a lot of boulders in it and hence they have to go between the boulders to get their sample and a lot of planning went into that.

Image Credit: NASA / Reuters

The spacecraft was designed by Lockheed Martin and it was launched in 2016 from the Kennedy Space Center. Japan is the only country to have accomplished this.

:::Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) validated COVIRAP. It is a diagnostic machine that has been developed by the researchers of Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. The device costs less than ₹10,000/- and it can produce a result within thirty minutes. The test will cost around ₹500/- and it can further be reduced through the Government's intervention.

Image Credit: https://indianexpress.com/

Professor V.K. Tewari, Director at IIT Kharagpur, said while addressing a virtual conference that various commercial units have already approached the institute for technology licensing to enable a rapid reach of this innovation to the common people.

October 22, 2020 (Thursday)
:::The number of Corona Cases as reported on Aarogya Setu App were as follows:
Confirmed - 77,06,946
Recovered - 68,74,518
Deceased - 1,16,616

:::#BoycottErosNow trended on Twitter after people started to criticize Eros Now for posting vulgar memes on Navratri. Some of the memes featured Katrina Kaif, Ranveer Singh & Salman Khan, and read:

Image Credit: https://lehren.com/

Eros Now, later, issued an apology and deleted all the vulgar posts.

:::The Union Cabinet, led by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved ₹3,737 crore bonus - Productivity Link Bonus (PLB) and Non-Productivity Linked Bonus (Non-PLB), for the year 2019-2020. The bonus will benefit around 30.6 lakh non-gazetted central government employees. PLB of ₹2,791 crore will benefit around 16.97 lakh non-gazetted employees of Railways, Posts, Defence, EPFO and ESIC, while Non-PLB of ₹946 crore will benefit around 13.70 lakh non-gazetted employees.

Image Credit: https://www.igecorner.com/

Prakash Javadekar, Union Minister, said that the bonus would be given in a single installment through Direct Benefit Transfer, before Vijayadashmi.

:::Soumya Kanti Ghosh, SBI economist, wrote in a report that increasing the legal marriage age of women from eighteen years carries various social and economic benefits for India. Some of the benefits are: low maternal deaths, improvement in nutrition levels, enables women to achieve greater financial independence and puts more girls in college. Dr. Ghosh also said that the mean female marriage age in India is already twenty-one years, and only about 35% of the girls are married before twenty-one years of age.

Image Credit: https://crowdwisdom.live/

The Government panel is currently looking at the right marriageable age for women and may raise it to twenty-one years. This would be the first revision in more than four decades and it will put India in the league of Asian peers such as China, Japan and Singapore.

October 23, 2020 (Friday)
:::The number of Corona Cases were as follows:
Confirmed - 77,61,312
Recovered - 69,48,497
Deceased - 1,17,306

:::Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) approved Covaxin, a Corona Virus vaccine that has been developed by Bharat Biotech (Hyderabad) in collaboration with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), for phase three clinical trials in India after suggesting some minor amendments in the prototype based on the data that it received from phase one & two.

Image Credit: https://www.dnaindia.com/

The phase three study will cover 28,500 participants, aged eighteen years & above, across ten states, and the subjects would be given two doses of experimental vaccine within a gap of twenty-eight days.

:::Revenue of Manchester United fell by 19% to around $668 million, due to suspension of football activities in England for three months till June 2020 because of the pandemic. The club also reported an annual loss of over $30 million, approximately.

Image Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/

Ed Woodward, Executive Vice Chairman, issued a statement saying that crowds have been permitted to return to varying degrees in over twenty European countries with significant capacity restrictions to allow for social distancing, and he urged the Government of the United Kingdom to follow these positive examples as soon as it is safe to do so.

This week's Special Section is dedicated to a Vadodara based social group, "Happy Faces Vadodara," that is also known as HFV.

Image Credit: https://www.facebook.com/happyfacesvadodara/

HFV is a group of matured individuals who go extra miles to help the needy and the underprivileged people of the society. The motto of the groups is "Service to Mankind is Service to God".

They have organized various events and they have initiated various campaigns for the underprivileged section of our society. One such event that they organized was, "King/Queen for the Day". The event was organized for specially abled and autistic children. A huge number of cars were decorated, in which children were given a ride around the city. This was followed by a well spent afternoon at Kamati Baug, where children rode the toy train and had a treat from McDonald's restaurant.

Image Credit: https://www.facebook.com/happyfacesvadodara/

Another amazing event that HFV organized was, "A Night With The Stars 2020". The event was organized on February 23, 2020 in collaboration with Life+. It was a musical concert that featured Ashva Band along with various other artists. Around one-thousand underprivileged children were invited to the concert, and the entry for everyone else was absolutely free. The event was inspired from previous year's success, and the group hopes to continue with it in the coming future.

The launch of a recent campaign, "Cup of Happiness" has marked the beginning of another initiative, where HFV aims to feed nutritional food to the poor. The members of the group get a cup of boiled milk along with some biscuits and deliver it to the underprivileged children every Monday.

Image Credit: https://www.facebook.com/happyfacesvadodara/

To know more about them & their activities, kindly visit their social media account on Facebook @happyfacesvadodara, Instagram @happyfacesvadodara and YouTube @HappyFacesVadodara.

That is all for this week.

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I hope that the blog was useful and it helped you in catching up with what happened. If you have anything to contribute, then please feel free to comment. Do share this blog with everyone you know and help them too.

*Disclaimer: The information has been presented in this blog after reviewing various news articles. In case you find any article, or if you have any article, that states some facts differently, then share them in the comment section. Please keep the publishing date of the article in mind as it may be an update on the article which was published previously, or it may contain outdated information if it was published before the date mentioned in this blog. The blogger is not responsible for any transaction that happens between the reader and the brand.