Reliance fights back

In Punjab, the company’s telecom towers have borne the brunt of popular rage. As a result, the company filed a 637-page petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court that claimed:

• 1,500 towers have been attacked, crippling Jio connectivity in the state. 
• Jio subscribers were being forced to port to other networks and its employees have received death threats.
• Vested interests “inimical” to the company had “actively engaged in spreading false rumours to the effect that Reliance was “somehow a beneficiary” of the farm laws.

Reliance also issued a media statement that declared:

• “Neither Reliance nor any of our subsidiaries has purchased any agricultural land, directly or indirectly… for the purpose of ‘corporate’ or ‘contract’ farming. We have absolutely no plans to do so.”
• The company will never enter into any “long-term procurement contracts to gain unfair advantage over farmers.”
• Last but not least, it declared total allegiance to the Minimum Support Price: “Reliance and its affiliates fully share and support the aspiration of Indian farmers to get a fair and profitable price on a predictable basis for what they produce with exemplary hard work, innovation and dedication.”

Meanwhile, the farmers: declared that the Reliance petition is “full of false claims.” Also: The most recent round of talks with the government once again ended in a deadlock.

The great pandemic: A quick update

• England is returning to total lockdown until mid-February—thanks to spiralling case numbers triggered by the new strain of the virus. As of Monday, 27,000 people were hospitalised—40% more than at the peak of the first wave in April 2020. Scotland has fully shut down, as well.
• A UK study suggests that a cheap and widely available drug called Ivermectin—used for head lice!—can cut the number of Covid deaths by 80%. It looked at 11 randomised trials involving more than 1,000 patients. Of those taking the drug, eight patients died—compared to 44 who took the placebo. But other experts say the evidence is “interesting, perhaps encouraging, but not yet convincing.”
• A member of the Oxford vaccine team has warned that the new strain in South Africa could evade current vaccines—and is more worrying than the UK mutation. The reason: One of the changes is in the part that helps the virus bind itself to the human cell. Antibodies triggered by the vaccine are supposed to interfere with this binding—and they may not be as effective. That said, his takeaway quote: “Everyone should stay calm. It’s going to be fine. We’re now in a game of cat and mouse. These are not the only two variants we will see. We are going to see lots of variants.”
• First, 85 people in Chennai’s ITC Grand Chola tested positive on Saturday. Now, there’s a new cluster of 20 staff members at the city’s Leela Palace hotel. Authorities have ordered tests on all staff across all hotels.
• Yet none of this has interfered with the state government’s decision to lift curbs on movie theatres. Giving in to pressure from big stars like Vijay and Silambarasan, theatres can function at 100% occupancy—just in time for the big releases over Pongal.

Julian Assange ducks US extradition

A UK judge has refused to extradite the Wikileaks founder to the United States—where he faces 17 espionage charges for publishing confidential documents pertaining to national security.  The reason offered by the judge: “I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.” She argued that he may kill himself due to conditions of “near total isolation” in a US prison. What this means: Assange no longer faces the possibility of being sentenced to 175 years in jail. (Associated Press)

A massive data leak

Debit and credit card information of 100 million Indians is up for sale on the dark web. The reason: hackers were able to access the information via Juspay—which processes payments for the likes of Amazon, MakeMyTrip, and Swiggy etc. According to NDTV, the details leaked include card expiry dates, customer IDs, and masked card numbers with the first and last four digits of the cards fully visible. 

But according to Inc42, the damage is more extensive:

“This includes a user’s card brand (VISA/Mastercard), card expiry date, the last four digits of the card, the masked card number, the type of card (credit/debit), the name on the card, card fingerprint, card ISIN, customer ID and merchant account ID, among several other details. In all, over 16 fields of data relating to their payment cards have been leaked for at least 20 million users, as conceded by Juspay, a subset of the total number of user records (100 million) that have been leaked.”

South Korea has a population problem

For the first time in its history, the nation recorded more deaths than births in 2020. Only 275,800 babies were born last year—down 10% from 2019—and around 307,764 people died. That’s not good news for a country that already has the world's lowest birth rate—and whose 60-plus citizens account for 24% of the population. The big reason: women don’t want to get married and be pushed into traditional family-rearing roles. 

“In 2018, just over 22% of South Korean women who were single or had never married said they thought tying the knot was a necessary part of life, compared with almost 47% a decade earlier. That shift is reflected in a drop in the number of marriages, from 434,900 in 1996 to 257,600 last year.”

Virat Kohli enters pandemic dog house

Early last month, the proud to-be-papa went to a baby store with Hardik Pandya— where he obligingly posed for photos. Sweet, except the happy maskless shoppers violated biosecurity protocols. This breach was unmasked when the proud staff shared photos:

Sydney Morning Herald has more on what to make of these minor but multiple breaches by the Indian team.

A film festival for one

Imagine spending seven days alone on a remote island in the North Sea—with no iPhone or even a book—watching 60 film premieres. Well, that’s exactly what one lucky movie buff will do if they are selected by the Swedish Film Festival—which is putting a whole new spin on socially distanced binge-watching due to the pandemic. Variety has more on this unique experiment. Watch the organisers’ promo trailer for what they call The Isolated Cinema experience below:

NYC has a scary squirrel problem

Yes, you read that right. Squirrels have started attacking passersby without provocation, and the encounters have been frightening and bloody (see photos here). Nope, no one knows what’s setting off the sudden rash of rage attacks. For example, one resident was standing on her stoop, when a squirrel ran up her leg and started biting her:

“We’re wrestling in the snow and there’s blood everywhere and my fingers getting chewed and it won’t let go… Eventually, it just stopped and there I was a big bloody mess.”

Really? We have to worry about squirrels now? 

Earth is a very lucky planet

The first ever mass simulation of its kind put 100,000 randomly generated planets through the effects of random climate-altering events over three billion years 100 times. Researchers found that only one planet was able to maintain habitability for all its 100 simulations. So when we start to feel despair at the state of the planet, ponder this fact: Earth has managed to remain habitable for nearly four billion years despite being brought to the brink by mass extinctions, Ice Ages, asteroids and more. As the lead researcher points out:

“We can now understand that Earth stayed suitable for life for so long due, at least in part, to luck… For instance, if a slightly larger asteroid had hit Earth, or had done so at a different time, then Earth may have lost its habitability altogether. To put it another way, if an intelligent observer had been present on the early Earth as life first evolved, and was able to calculate the chances of the planet staying habitable for the next several billion years, the calculation may well have revealed very poor odds."

Of course, this also means that there are very poor odds of finding life out there in the universe.