Royal estate discovered: Archaeologists uncovered a gigantic complex in northern Israel that they think once served as a rural estate for ancient kings of biblical fame. The stunning building is in Horvat Tevet, an ancient site just outside modern-day Afula. About 2,900 years ago, archaeologists say, the structure served as a key place for Israelite officials to collect and redistribute agricultural produce from the region.
Farukkhabad hostage: Nearly 20 children have been held hostage by a man at his house in Uttar Pradesh’s Farukkhabad. The man, Suresh Batham, with criminal antecedents is reported to have invited the kids over to his place on the pretext of a birthday party and then held them hostage. When some local people tried to get the door opened, he started firing from inside injuring three policemen and a villager. Batham even hurled a low intensity bomb from the window.
Chatbot Meena: Google introduced chatbot Meena: “Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity,” it said in a blog post.
Coronavirus in India: Union health ministry confirming that a student who came back from to Kerala from China’s Wuhan tested positive for the infection. “One positive case of novel coronavirus patient, of a student studying in Wuhan University, has been reported in Kerala. The patient has tested positive for novel coronavirus and is in isolation in the hospital,” the health ministry said.
World Games Athlete: India women’s hockey captain Rani Rampal on Thursday won the 2019 World Games Athlete of the Year award. The prize, which is voted for by the public, is given for outstanding performance, along with social commitment and fair behaviour.
Anti-CAA resolution: The Bhupesh Baghel cabinet on Thursday passed a resolution against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and urged the Centre to withdraw it. The Congress-ruled Chhattisgarh is set to become the fifth state to pass a resolution against the Act during the state Assembly budget session, scheduled to begin next month.
Rahul Bajaj: Bajaj Auto’s Chairman Rahul Bajaj will step down from executive role to become a non-executive director while continuing to hold his current position. Bajaj, who has been a director of the company since April 1, 1970, was last reappointed by the board for a five-year term with effect from April 1, 2015, and his term as executive chairman is expiring on March 31, 2020, the company said in a regulatory filing.
Corona effect on oil: Global crude oil demand could drop as much as 42 per cent to 0.77 million barrels per day (million b/d) from the current estimated 1.33 million b/d in February 2020 on a year-on-year basis if the Wuhan virus, or the crononavirus as it is also known, spreads more, says a note from S&P Global Platts.
Samatha case: A special court in Telangana on Thursday awarded death sentence to three persons in connection with the Samatha gang-rape and murder case. “Today the special court has awarded death sentence to the three accused — Shaik Baba, Shaik Shaobuddin and Shaik Maqdoom in Samatha case,” Malla Reddy Superintendent of Police (SP) Komaran Bheem Asifabad told ANI here.
Nirbhaya case: The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the curative petition of one of the four death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case saying “no case is made out”. The top court also rejected convict Akshay Kumar Singh’s plea seeking stay of his execution.
RBI fined HDFC: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has imposed a monetary penalty of Rs one crore on HDFC Bank for non-compliance of Know Your Customer (KYC) norms. “The penalty has been imposed in exercise of powers vested in RBI under the provisions of section 47 A (1) (c) read with section 46 (4) (i) of the Banking Regulation Act 1949, taking into account the failure of the bank to adhere to the aforesaid direction issued by RBI,” said the central bank in a statement.
Wuhan: China is battling a “demon” virus that has so far killed more than 100 people, President Xi Jinping said Tuesday, as foreign nations prepared to evacuate their citizens and the US said it was developing a vaccine.
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