JAMSHEDPUR, India — Tulsi Kumari, an 11-year-old mango vendor from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, fulfilled her dream of buying a smartphone to attend online classes by selling a dozen mangoes. The miracle happened after Ameya Hete, a Mumbai-based businessman, came to know about Kumari’s struggles and decided to further her determination to study by buying 12 mangoes at INR 10,000 ($134) each. Kumari said that during the lockdown, her family’s financial situation had deteriorated. Her parents had no means to buy a smartphone for her to attend online classes. “I wanted to buy a smartphone but whatever we…
Author: zenger.news
WASHINGTON — Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical adviser, said on June 30 that the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus is the greatest threat to the United States’ attempt to eradicate Covid-19. The head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said he is “quite concerned” about the Delta variant in the US. He said that the delta variant could spread much more efficiently and cause more severe disease. “The Delta variant has the capability of spreading much more efficiently from person to person,” said Fauci. “It also can cause more severe disease. So, two things about it are…
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Another Canadian indigenous community announced on June 30 the discovery of the remains of 182 people in unmarked graves around a former indigenous residential school near Cranbrook in the British Columbia province of Canada. “The Aq’am community, a member of the Ktunaxa Nation located near the city of Cranbrook, used ground-penetrating radar to find the remains close to the former St. Eugene’s Mission School,” the Lower Kootenay Band said on June 30. The indigenous school was operated by the Catholic Church from 1912 until the early 1970s. The building has since been converted into a resort and casino with an adjacent golf course. “It…
NEW DELHI — On the sixth anniversary of Digital India, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that ‘Digital India’ is the country’s slogan of strength in the 21st century. Digital India is a flagship initiative by the government to transform the nation into a digitally empowered society. Modi also spoke to beneficiaries of the DIKSHA scheme on July 1 via video conferencing. The Diksha scheme is the national digital infrastructure for teachers in the country. It aims to strengthen the Indian education system while keeping teachers at the center of the system. “If there is zeal for innovation, there is a passion for…
CHENNAI, India — India’s Uniphore, an AI startup that deals with enterprises’ customer service calls, won the Frost & Sullivan Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award in Conversational Automation for 2021. Frost & Sullivan, a research and consulting firm, said the award was for Uniphore’s innovative approach towards customer needs in the development and support it provides in its conversational service automation platform using Artificial Intelligence. The award is the result of an independent, non-sponsored evaluation by Frost & Sullivan’s analyst team. Uniphore is a conversational service automation platform, which allows customer service agents of enterprises to automate tasks, and provides features like virtual…
BENGALURU, India — Indians are coming out of their homes to shop as lockdowns are slowly being lifted, and the markets are bracing for a demand surge. But consumer-facing companies, including automotive firms, electronics goods, and personal computer makers, may not be able to deliver products on time. “Chip [or semiconductor] shortage is going to affect many companies across industries,” V. Balakrishnan, chairman of early-stage venture capital fund Exfinity Venture Partners, told Zenger News. “Automobile firms, especially, are going to be hit big-time,” Balakrishnan, who was a former board member at multinational information technology company Infosys, said. “The high-end gaming industry is also…
The latest federal data on inventories of oil and refined petroleum products suggest the rally in crude oil prices will continue, despite a slight decrease in U.S. demand, analysts told Zenger. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports on commercial levels of crude oil and refined petroleum products such as gasoline each week. Broad-based drains on inventories usually are indicative of solid demand in the economy. The report also shows that total commercial crude oil inventories, not counting what’s stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, declined by 6.7 million barrels from the week ending June 18. Adding to the perception that…
A court in the Netherlands has rejected a bid by Ferrari to have a Dutch Daytona counterfeit scrapped because the quality of the kit car was so bad, nobody would have mistaken it for the real thing. Italian car manufacturer Ferrari, located in the city of Modena, requested the destruction of a yellow replica of its Daytona model which had been bought in the U.S. in 2018 by a Dutch man who has a business specializing in kit cars. Ferrari’s lawsuit, which also included a paragraph that demanded recordings of the destruction process, has now been rejected by The Hague…
BELLARINE, Australia — A federal inquiry has recommended Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton meet with a local community concerned about a possible cancer cluster linked to pesticide use. Residents on the Bellarine Peninsula, southwest of Melbourne, believe a mosquito spraying program in the 1980s is to blame for dozens of cases of cancer and autoimmune disease in the area. Many of the cases occurred among people aged in their 20s and 30s who attended Barwon Heads Primary School and Bellarine Secondary College in the nearby town of Drysdale. But a 2019 investigation by Sutton found no evidence of a higher rate…
Finnish archeologists have found a 4,000-year-old serpent staff possibly used by a Stone Age shaman for ritual purposes. In cooperation with the Finnish Heritage Agency, researchers from the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki unearthed the wooden staff at the Jarvensuo 1 archeological site on the shores of Rautajarvi Lake in southwestern Finland. The site was accidentally discovered by ditch diggers in the 1950s, and the first find was a wooden paddle dated back to the Neolithic period. In the 1980s, scientists discovered several more well-preserved artifacts — including pottery, fishing implements and a wooden ladle with a…