Month: October 2023

🔥 Guy surfs into breaching whale pic.twitter.com/uKtmttcXJI

— NatureIsAmazing (@OurNatureRocks) October 25, 2023

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Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra on Friday said that she gave businessman Darshan Hiranandani access to her online Lok Sabha account but denied taking any cash from him, reported The Indian Express.

“No MP types her/his own question,” said Moitra. “I have given him [Hiranandani] the password and login for someone in his office to type it [the questions] down and upload.”

She said that the questions can only be submitted upon entering a one-time password, which is delivered to her phone number. Hence, said the Trinamool Congress leader, no question went on the Parliament website without her knowledge.

Her statement comes days after Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking to have Moitra immediately suspended for allegedly taking bribes from Hiranandani to ask questions in Parliament.

Dubey cited a letter from lawyer Jai Anant Dehadrai, reportedly Moitra’s estranged partner, to claim that he had “irrefutable evidence” about her asking questions in Parliament in exchange for cash and gifts.

The Hiranandani Group initially dismissed Dubey’s allegations against Moitra as having “no merit”. However, Hiranandani, the chief executive officer of the real estate company, on October 19 submitted an affidavit to the ethics committee, accusing Moitra of spreading unverified information about industrialist Gautam Adani.

Moitra told The Indian Express that Dehadrai’s allegations were fake. “You…

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By the time he disembarked from a ship in Bombay in 1929, Vienna-born writer and journalist Wolfgang von Weisl was a strong proponent of Zionism. Living as a young Jew in Austria at a time when Nazi ideas were germinating had convinced him that there was no future for Jews in Europe.

Travelling to India on documents issued by Britain, which had established Mandatory Palestine in 1920, von Weisl was keen on contacting the Jewish communities in the western parts of the country. One of his aims was to draw Baghdadi Jews and Bene Israel into the movement for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

But his interactions with these communities, and overall experience of India, left him in shock. He wrote down his thoughts in a January 1930 article for the Buffalo Jewish Review.

No proselytising policy

Von Weisl claimed he crossed the Himalayas into Tibet dressed as a Hindu monk. When people asked him his religion, his answer befuddled them. “A Jew – by most this was taken to be a sub-caste of Brahminism or something of the sort – with the tacit assumption that by the colour of my skin, I must be a Brahmin for….they had never heard of Jews,” he wrote….

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The Bombay High Court has observed that merely liking a post on social media is not an offence under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, reported Bar and Bench.

However, the High Court added that sharing or retweeting such posts would amount to “transmission” under the provision.

Section 67 of the Act deals with the punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form.

The High Court passed the order on October 18 on the petition of a man named Mohammed Imran Kazi seeking to quash charges against him of making social media posts that led to over 500 Muslims assembly for a procession without a permit, reported The Hindu. The police have alleged that the procession threatened peace and security.

Kazi’s counsel argued that there was no offence against him to show that he committed an offence.

The investigating officer in the case told the court that Kazi had liked a social media post calling for the assembly. However, the officer failed to provide any evidence to support that Kazi had shared or created the post.

The court, however, observed that just liking the post does not attract Section 67 of the Act. It also observed that the section is for obscene and not for “provocative” material.

“The words ‘lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest’…

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In 2020, psychologists Adam Waytz of Northwestern University and Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Cologne in Germany set out to answer a question: Do I get happier when I focus on my own desires, or when I focus on doing something for others, instead? We generally think about the trade-off between self-care and caring for others as one between feeling good and doing what is morally superior.

If you take the afternoon off and go shopping, you’ll enjoy it. If instead you volunteer at a local charity, you’ll miss that fun but be a better person. Obviously, this trade-off has limits; you need to take care of yourself to help others, and helping others can be fun for you. In general, however, this is how we see the “me versus others” choice. The researchers questioned whether there really was a trade-off to build the life you want at all. They wondered if, just maybe, focusing on others created more happiness for you than self-care did.

To investigate this idea, they divided 263 participants into three groups, each with a different set of instructions.

1. Moral Deeds Group: Today, we would like you to do at least one moral deed for others. By “moral…

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