One of the most adored couples in the entertainment industry, Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor is getting married. They dated for a few years and are all set to take their relationship a step ahead. The duo has been extremely tight-lipped about any details regarding their big day. However, Pinkvilla was the first to break the news that their wedding festivities will start from the 13th of April.
Ahead of their wedding, Television actress Shivangi Joshi who is better known for her roles in daily soaps such as Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai, Balika Vadhu 2, and others expressed her happiness about the arrangement. In an interview with ABP, Shivangi said, “They make a magical couple and they look so good together. I am very happy for Ranbir and Alia.” To note, the wedding preparations are underway and Vastu, RK Studios, RK House, etc. are getting all decked up.
Earlier, today, Ranbir’s sister Riddhima Kapoor Sahni arrived Mumbai with her husband Bharat Sahni and daughter Samaira. As the media personnel photographed them, they exchanged a few words with Riddhima. When a paparazzo asked her if the wedding is indeed confirmed, she was quick to say, “Haan…milenge jaldi se. (Yes…we shall meet soon)”.
In addition to this, Pinkvilla had exclusively informed that the couple will host a grand reception for their industry friends at Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. The reception party will kick-start at 9 pm in the 5-star hotel’s Ballroom. A source close to Ranbir revealed, “They have decided to host the reception at Taj Mahal Palace ‘mostly’ on April 17.
Previous attribution studies have quantified the effects of climate change on individual Atlantic storms: For instance, researchers estimated that up to 38 percent of the extreme rainfall that Hurricane Harvey dumped on southeastern Texas in August 2017 was attributable to climate change. Dr. Reed was among the researchers who confirmed that climate change also played a role in Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019.
The new study is unusual in that it examined the effects of climate change not on a single hurricane but on a full hurricane season, including not only the headline-grabbing storms but also the seemingly ordinary ones. Dr. Reed said the findings provided strong evidence that the anthropogenic impact was not an anomaly confined to huge events like Harvey.
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Deadly combination. Global warming is greatly increasing the risk that extreme wildfires in the American West will be followed by heavy rainfall, a new study has found, highlighting the need to be prepared for mudslides and flash floods after the flames from severe blazes are out.
Ice shelf collapses. For the first time since satellites began observing Antarctica nearly half a century ago, an ice shelf has collapsed on the eastern part of the continent. The 450-square-mile ice shelf was located in an area known as Wilkes Land; the loss occurred in mid-March.
“If you just do this objectively through a whole season, you get similar results,” he said.
Rosimar Rios-Berrios, a research meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved with the new study, said that examining a full hurricane season rather than individual storms provided a higher degree of confidence that the findings accurately reflected the role of climate change.
“There’s a lot of power in studying individual events, but in the end, a single event is not enough because every hurricane is different,” she said.
A separate analysis released on Monday found that climate change also most likely increased the intensity of the rainfall from two vicious tropical storms that battered southeastern Africa earlier this year. But the researchers said that because of a shortage of high-quality weather data for that region, they could not measure the precise influence of global warming on those storms.
Dr. Reed noted that the same methodology his team employed could be used to quantify the impact of climate change on a storm in close to real time — or to illustrate how much worse storms will get if nations continue to burn fossil fuels.
The study published on Tuesday compared the 2020 hurricane season as we experienced it with the hypothetical 2020 hurricane season in a world that has not been warmed by human activities. Since the 19th century, the burning of oil, gas and coal has increased average global temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. It is also possible to compare the season as experienced with the version that might occur after, say, 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming — the threshold beyond which scientists say highly destructive storms become significantly more likely.
“It’s important to not plan for the 2020 hurricane season in the future,” Dr. Reed said. “It’s to plan for what the 2020 hurricane season plus climate change would look like in the future.”
Mr. Benjamin said recently that he had been cooperating with investigators, who had issued subpoenas in recent weeks to the State Senate in Albany and people who had advised his comptroller campaign. The lieutenant governor, accompanied by his lawyers, met with prosecutors last week, according to a person familiar with the matter, and his top aides were reassuring allies in private that he expected to be cleared of any wrongdoing in the case.
But the Harlem real estate investor who illegally assisted his campaign, Gerald Migdol, while not listed by name in the indictment, is identified as “CC-1,” short for co-conspirator 1. He began providing information to investigators after he was arrested in November on an indictment charging him with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and other crimes related to his role in the fund-raising scheme, according to the people with knowledge of the matter.
In that indictment, prosecutors said that Mr. Migdol began to steer thousands of dollars worth of fraudulent contributions to Mr. Benjamin in October 2019, just a month after the state senator filed to run for comptroller. They accused him of making straw donations in the name of individuals, including his 2-year-old grandchild, who did not consent to them, and of reimbursing others for the cost of their contributions.
At the time, the prosecutors did not comment on Mr. Migdol’s motive, or explicitly name Mr. Benjamin. But they said his scheme was designed to help the candidate tap into New York City’s generous public campaign matching funds program and secure him tens of thousands of dollars in additional campaign cash.
The two men were close and traded accolades at a series of charitable and political functions over the years in Harlem, where Mr. Migdol made a name for himself distributing school supplies and Thanksgiving turkeys through his charity.
State records and a Facebook photo posted by Mr. Migdol at the time show Mr. Benjamin presenting him with an oversized cardboard check for $50,000 for the charity, Friends of Public School Harlem, in September 2019. It is unclear if the funds, which were earmarked as part of a discretionary state education fund, were ever actually delivered, but they represented one of the largest outside gifts ever directed to the small charity.
A graduate of Ivy League schools, Mr. Benjamin, spent much of his career in banking and affordable housing development before winning a State Senate seat representing most of Harlem in 2017.
Gun violence hit historic lows in 2018 and 2019. Even with recent increases, rates of shootings, felony assaults and overall major crimes are similar to or below the levels of the late 2000s and early 2010s. There have been nine fewer murders this year compared with the same period last year.
This year’s first three months have also seen rises in crimes like burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies compared to the same periods in 2020 and 2021, though experts warn against short-term comparisons, particularly during the statistic-skewing pandemic.
New York isn’t the only city struggling to check crime amid the pandemic. In Houston, at least 473 homicides were recorded last year; New York saw only 15 more, with nearly four times the total population. And just 90 minutes south, Philadelphia saw 559 murders in 2021, in a city with just 1.5 million residents.
But fresh anxieties have driven warnings about a return to New York’s “bad old days,” when there were many years with more than 2,000 murders. To some, the resemblance between the periods lies not in the crime or the data, but in the coverage.
“It reminds me of the 1990s, in the sense that every incident of violence becomes a major news story,” said Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“Some of these things are just shocking,” he said. “But it’s also important to remember that these things have always happened, and still been fairly infrequent incidents. But they stay with you for so long and stick in your memory.”
Some types of crime have risen significantly since the pandemic began.
Shootings are twice as high as in the years preceding the pandemic, and the burden falls primarily on Black and Latino neighborhoods. More than 1,800 shootings were reported annually in the past two years after dropping under 900 in 2018. Attacks against Asian New Yorkers have spiked, with over 130 hate-crime complaints filed to the police last year, after just one reported in 2019.
Cryptocurrency mixers have been an interesting topic of discussion ever since the advent of cryptocurrencies and their adoption by retail investors around the world.
Cryptocurrency mixers are services that essentially focus on one feature of a blockchain network: privacy.
Cryptocurrency mixers, also known as tumblers, provide anonymity so no one can trace the sender or receiver of a transaction. This can help protect the identity of individuals who want to be completely anonymous and non-traceable. How cryptocurrency mixers work is that they break down the funds sent using the mixer and scramble them with other transactions. They break the link which associates the holder’s identity to the crypto they own.
A process used to anonymize cryptocurrency transactions is known as CoinJoin, created initially back in 2013 by Bitcoin (BTC) developer Gregory Maxwell. In the thread on the Bitcointalk forum, Maxwell elaborated on how these transactions are structured and how the privacy of the transitions can be significantly enhanced without making huge changes to the network. Essentially, this concept involves a mixing block box from where users get their transactions and comprises hundreds of transactions from various wallets. CoinJoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrency mixers on the market.
There are primarily two kinds of mixers, centralized and decentralized mixers. Centralized mixers receive cryptocurrency from users into the mixer and send back different cryptocurrencies by charging a fee. The transaction addresses of the several users who deposit their cryptocurrency into the mixers are managed by a program. Cryptocurrencies returned to users are not the same as those initially deposited, and they may be returned to the user’s account through more than one transaction.
In contrast, decentralized mixers utilize other crypto protocols to obscure transactions using either a coordinated network or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Cointelegraph discussed the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized mixers with Marie Tatibouet, chief marketing officer of crypto exchange Gate.io. She said:
“Centralized services are obviously more accessible and more approachable. However, they will have access to your Bitcoin and IP addresses. Hence, they are not the most private service in the world. Decentralized mixers can be a little less approachable, but they are a lot more private.”
However, cryptocurrency mixers and tumblers have a bad reputation since they may be used for money laundering or masking huge amounts of earnings. Although not illegal by law, the service providers stand a chance to get embroiled in a crypto money-laundering investigation. There have been several instances where cryptocurrency mixers and their users have come under the scanner by various jurisdictions and governments.
Mixers could be in a gray area
Most recently, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency wants to regulate cryptocurrency mixers under the country’s relevant Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
The agency’s head of the financial investigation, Gary Cathcart, said that transaction mixing tools offer a layer of anonymity to criminals, allowing them to maintain the flow of criminal cash by obscuring its origin.
According to Cathcart, subjecting mixers to AML laws would ensure that mixing services conduct thorough AML checks and audit all the transactions that are passing through the mixer. While on the surface, this might seem like an idea that works, there is a high possibility that such checks would discourage any users attempting to use the mixer.
A closer look at the numbers reveals that the concerns of the crime agencies are not without reason. A recent report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis called “2022 Crypto Crime Report” found that the total cryptocurrency value received from illicit addresses hit an all-time high of $14 billion in 2021, nearly doubling from $7.8 billion in the previous year.
At the same time, it is also worth noting that the total market capitalization of the entire market has grown significantly along with the adoption of digital assets by retail investors. Chainalaysis’s crime report also highlights the Illicit percentage share of all cryptocurrency currency, which was at a four-year low of 0.15% in 2021.
This indicates that as the digital asset market develops further, the checks and balances being placed on transaction routes by market participants have been acting as a deterrent for criminals and money laundering activities alike. In fact, most of the transactions flagged as received from illicit addresses are from hackers that stole funds from various DeFi protocols like Wormhole and Poly Network in 2021.
Anton Gulin, regional director at crypto exchange AAX, told Cointelegraph that the whole essence of mixers is not illegal by default. “However, some countries are steadily imposing the Financial Action Task Force’s Travel Rules, providing that exchanges and other virtual asset market players must collect, verify and transmit originator and beneficiary customer information for any cryptocurrency transaction.”
The imposition of this rule prevents regulated entities like centralized exchanges from receiving funds from mixers, which, in turn, puts the entire activity into a gray area. Adrian Jonklass, head of research at blockchain API provider Covalent, told Cointelegraph:
“They operate in a gray area because at a global level the regulations around fundamentals of what comprises virtual assets, whether they fall under money transfer regulations, and or commodity regulations and or securities regulations and or some new category is still being developed.”
The FATF’s rule on the digital assets industry has the potential to curb activity even further. A survey of crypto businesses conducted by Notabene, a crypto compliance firm, found that 70% of the respondents are either already following the Travel Rule or are planning to align their compliance to it in early 2022.
Relevance of crypto mixers in 2022
While cryptocurrency mixers are originally designed to further anonymity and privacy, the evolution of blockchain technology and innovations like whitelisting and decentralized identifier protocols could make them less relevant.
Guilin said that there is no apparent benefit to using a crypto mixer in 2022, stating that “by now, it’s widely associated with something illegal and is indeed related in the majority of cases. Therefore, most of the mixer addresses have been clustered by Know Your Customer providers and are easily traceable.”
This means that users cannot use their funds after mixing them without being traced by the market participants, as transactions withdrawn from a mixer are marked and go against the logic of using a mixer in the first place.
Cryptocurrency mixers definitely still have the potential to appeal to the original crypto romantics that consider the privacy and anonymity of their cryptocurrency transactions a high priority.
However, their relevance today could be waning due to the retail adoption models and other checks and balances that the market participants in the ecosystem are now utilizing. The industry and blockchain technology at large have evolved exponentially since Maxwell spoke of the concept of CoinJoin; It could be important for service providers to realize this as well.
Snapchat has announced a new Dynamic Stories feature within its Discover feed to highlight news and information for users. This feed option will allow users to view the world’s latest happenings on the platform as it breaks. The social media platform will create Stories from the content created by the verified media publishers and content creators on the Web. Dynamic Stories is being tested in India, France, the US and the UK for now, and will come to more countries in the future. In India, Snapchat will use the media partners’ RSS feeds to automatically create stories for the Snapchat community in English, Hindi, and Marathi languages.
Snapchat on Tuesday, April 12, announced the launch of Dynamic Stories via a press release. Starting today, Snapchat members will see Stories update in real-time in the Discover feed of their Snapchat accounts. Dynamic Stories will use RSS Feeds to create Stories from the content a publisher has already generated on the Web. As mentioned, in India, Dynamic Stories will display content in different languages including English, Hindi, and Marathi. The company is planning to onboard various partners across other languages as well.
In India, Snapchat will feature content from publishers like GQ India, MissMalini, Pinkvilla, Sportskeeda, The Quint, Times Now, and Vogue India initially.
In the US, Snapchat has been associated with Axios, Bloomberg, CNN, Complex Networks, Condé Nast (Self, Vogue), ESPN, Insider, New York Post, Page Six, Self, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TMZ, Vice, and Vogue for presenting content. British Vogue, GQ UK, The Independent, and The Mirror are the Media partners in the UK.
In France, the social media company is partnering with Femme Actuelle, Foot Mercato, Gala, GQ France, Le Figaro, Marie Claire FR, Paris Match, and Vogue France for Dynamic Stories.
The social media platform has recently started testing multiple new features on the platform. Earlier this month, Snapchat unveiled a new feature to let users share videos directly from the YouTube app. It also introduced a set of new parental controls intended to protect users between the ages of 13 and 17 on the app.
At least 14 ads by mobile game operators broadcast during the first week of the ongoing IPL cricket tournament have been found to be violating the guidelines set by the advertising industry, self-regulatory watchdog ASCI said on Tuesday. The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) said it screened 35 ads from the online real-money gaming industry between March 26 and April 3, of which 14 were found to be in violation of its code.
Brands found to be breaching the code include My11Circle, Fairplay, Gamezy and Winzo, a statement said.
“ASCI is concerned to note that, despite clear guidelines, some online real-money gaming firms are attempting a shortcut. For an industry that is under significant regulatory scrutiny, such acts by some companies paint the entire industry as irresponsible,” ASCI’s chief executive Manisha Kapoor said.
She said IPL (Indian Premier League), which attracts huge eyeballs, requires “responsible behaviour” from brands, broadcasters, celebrities and ad creators.
ASCI, which also looks after advertising on digital platforms, found 285 social media ads of online real-money gaming companies in violation of its code which came into effect on December 2020.
The violations observed include dubious claims such as ‘India’s biggest 1st prize’, while in several cases the disclaimer informing consumers of the risks was flashed very quickly rather than at a normal speaking pace.
In some cases, the advertisements had celebrities acting while the disclaimer was being made, which distracts consumers from important information about risks, while others had disclaimers that were smaller than what has been prescribed.
“These attempts at glossing over the disclaimers required to be carried in the prescribed manner, informing about the risks of financial loss or game addiction, can severely compromise consumer interest. ASCI has urged gaming industry bodies to take up this issue with their members,” it said.
ASCI’s statement said its guidelines, which were backed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, require brands not to aim the products at minors, not present gaming as a source of livelihood or link it to success.
The guidelines also require all advertisements to carry a prominent disclaimer regarding the risk of financial loss and the addictive nature of such games, the statement added.
During exit interviews with the media, Russell Westbrook was candid about how he felt his first season went with the Los Angeles Lakers and the apparent ‘disconnect’ he had with former Laker coach Frank Vogel.
“I think it’s unfortunate, to be honest because I’ve never had an issue with any of my coaches before,” Westbrook said on Monday per ESPN. “I’m not sure what his issue was with me, or I’m not sure why, but I can’t really give you an answer to why we really never connected.”
Westbrook averaged 18.5 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 7.1 assists on the season and struggled with his efficiency, shooting 44.4 percent from the field and 29.8 percent on 3.4 3-point attempts a game. The Lakers (33-49) finished 11th in the Western Conference and missed the playoffs for the second time in the last four seasons despite a loaded roster led by Westbrook, LeBron James, and Anthony Davis.
“When I first got here, the ability to be able to do what I’m able to do for a team and an organization wasn’t given a fair chance,” Westbrook said about his role.
Westbrook is eligible to sign a $47 million player option over the offseason. Although his intentions to resign aren’t clear, he admitted that his production didn’t meet his standards after averaging a triple-double in his lone season with the Washington Wizards. The main thing that will lead him to resign is how the Lakers will fill the void at head coach and figure out the play style that the new coach will implement.
It is truly a proud moment for the popular Telly world couple Divyanka Tripathi and Vivek Dahiya as the former was honoured by the CM of Madhya Pradesh. Divyanka Tripathi was honoured with champions of change awards for her exemplary contribution through her roles in the shows and her real life. The actress is known for sporting powerful roles in the television shows like Yeh Hai Mohabbatein. She has been part of the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi 11, where she proved herself through her stunts.
Divyanka Tripathi’s husband Vivek shared a video on social media where Divyanka is seen dressed in a beautiful saree and going to the stage to collect the award for her exceptional work. She looked gorgeous in a yellow saree and black blouse. She had accessorized the look with a statement necklace and her hair was in a neat bun. Vivek Dahiya captioned, “Recorded this video with moist eyes and immense pride in my heart. @divyankatripathidahiya honoured with @championsofchangeawards by the Governor and Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shri Mangubhai Patel and Shri Shivraj Singh Chouhan, respectively. You are a delight to MP and to India. Keep inspiring!”
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Divyanka Tripathi and Vivek Dahiya are among the most popular couples in the entertainment world. They met during the shoot of their show and started dating. The couple tied the knot in 2016 and they are among the most socially active actors in the television industry. They love to go on trips and romantic dates at beautiful locations. They keep their fans updated about their adventures.
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