From The Newsroom: B S Yediyurappa offers bagina at Krishnaraja Sagar dam

In your evening news brief, From The Newsroom, Akshay Kumar is all set to feature in “Into the Wild with Bear Grylls.”; Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, for the fifth time, offered bagina at Krishnaraja Sagar (KRS) dam in Mandya district and Kabini dam in Mysuru district and Supreme Court refused to entertain a plea asking to set up a three-judge panel to inquire into the conduct of former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi as a judge of the apex court.

Here are the top news of today, Friday: August 21, 2020:

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi and superstar Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar is all set to feature in “Into the Wild with Bear Grylls.”

Akshay took to social media to announce this. Sharing a teaser for the episode, he tweeted: ““You thinking I mad… but mad only going into the wild.”

The Into the Wild episode featuring actor Akshay Kumar as a guest will premiere on September 11 on Discovery+

The Supreme Court refused to entertain a plea asking to set up a three-judge panel to inquire into the conduct of former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi as a judge of the apex court.

A bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra termed as “infructuous” the PIL and said the petitioner did not press for a hearing in the last two years and moreover, now that Gogoi has already demitted office.

Petitioner Arun Ramchandra Hublikar had sought an inquiry into the alleged “omission and commission” by Gogoi as a judge of the apex court.

Gogoi is now a Rajya Sabha member.

Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee Working President Satish Jarkiholi has demanded a judicial probe into the recent incident of violence in Bengaluru.

He said that the Congress party leaders and workers were being selectively targeted for inquiry by the police, hence a judicial probe was needed to clear the air.

He further said that Home Minister Basavaraj Bommai has been blaming the factions in the Congress for the violence.

Agreeing that there are factions within the Congress, Jarkiholi said that they were not involved in the violence.

He blamed the BJP government as being responsible for the violence, adding that complainants had been waiting for their complaint to be filed for more than three hours and had that been done immediately, violence could have been prevented.

Due to the dubious storage methods, a social media analytics company has exposed nearly hundreds of million user profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Apparently, Social Data, a company known for legally selling influential social media users' data to marketing companies, did not even incorporate password protection nor set-up any authentication process to access the database. Some hackers got their hands on this data and dumped it in dark websites.

The data dump contained personal information of the people and user-engagement metrics including username, officially registered name, account description, whether the profile belongs to a business or has advertisements, statistics about follower engagement, including: number of followers, engagement rate, follower growth rate, audience gender, audience age, audience location, likes and last post timestamp and some samples included email and phone numbers as well.

Bob Diachenko's Comparitech cybersecurity team identified the millions of user-profiles related to Instagram (19,23,92,954), TikTok (4,21,29,799 ), and YouTube (39,55,892) totalling close to 235 million in some undisclosed websites hosted at three separate IPv6 addresses. However, there is a twist here.

The exposed data had links to the origin (accounts-deep social-90 and accounts-deep social-91) and it belonged to the Deep Social. The latter's Application Programming Interface was banned and sued by Facebook and Instagram in 2018 for fraudulently scraping user profiles.

To know more about this report by Rohit KVN, read it on the Deccan Herald website.

A study published in The Lancet medical journal this week says that researchers in Singapore have discovered a new variant of the Covid-19 that causes milder infections.

It showed that Covid-19 patients infected with a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 had better clinical outcomes, including a lower proportion developing low blood oxygen or requiring intensive care.

The study also showed the variant, which has a large deletion in a part of its genome, elicited a more robust immune response.

The positive part is that scientists said the findings had implications for vaccine development and treatments for Covid-19.

With rains providing respite in the catchments of River Krishna and its tributaries in Karnataka and Maharashtra, the water inflow into Karnataka has receded today.

The level in River Krishna was below danger level with the inflow being 2.06 lakh cusecs.

The discharge of water from dams in Maharashtra had led to the water level in River Krishna reaching the danger mark yesterday.

Meanwhile, in the Southern part of the state: Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, for the fifth time, offered bagina at Krishnaraja Sagar (KRS) dam in Mandya district and Kabini dam in Mysuru district today.

Bagina is a puja that is offered when the reservoirs are full.

After offering the bagina at the KRS dam, he flew by helicopter and reached H D Kote taluk and offered bagina at Kabini dam.

The Chief Minister had to face the heat of protests by farmers' organisations in H D Kote taluk and Srirangapatna. The farmers have demanded the government to withdraw the amendment to the Land Reforms Act. The farmer organisations had planned to show black flags as a mark of protest against the amendment to the Act but they were not allowed near the dam as the police had beefed up security arrangements.

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