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Category: World

  • 120-year-old chocolate found in poet’s personal belongings

    120-year-old chocolate found in poet’s personal belongings

    A 120-year-old box of chocolate has been found from the personal collection of the late poet and journalist A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson by the staff at the National Library of Australia (NLA).

    Conservators at the NLA unearthed the sweet treats in a souvenir chocolate tin that was given to soldiers by Queen Victoria during the Boer War.

    The discovery was made by the library staff while unpacking the contents of the poet who wrote Waltzing Matilda and The Man from Snowy River. The purpose of unpacking the box that has the poet’s papers was to digitize the contents and make them available online.

    According to the National Library of Australia (NLA), the souvenir tin was commissioned by Queen Victoria and sent to South Africa during the Boer War as a gift to troops serving on the front.

    It is believed that the poet had brought the chocolates from a soldier while serving as a war correspondent in South Africa for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age for nearly a year starting in October 1899 before returning to Australia.

    The NLA conservator told that there was quite an interesting smell when they were unpacked.

    Paterson’s papers were passed on by his family after his death in 1941. However, the poet never referenced the chocolate bar in his writing.

  • Picture of widowed penguins comforting each other will warm your heart

    Picture of widowed penguins comforting each other will warm your heart

    A picture of two widowed penguins appearing to comfort each other in Australia has won Oceanographic magazine’s Ocean Photography Awards.

    The photo was taken by German photographer Tobias Baumgaertner in Melbourne.

    He was told that the two penguins had recently lost their partners and they often appeared to be comforting each other through a warm hug.

    The German photographer won the magazine’s Community Choice Award.

    “A volunteer approached me and told me that the white one was an elderly lady who had lost her partner and apparently so did the younger male to the left,” the photographer wrote in an Instagram post.

    “Since then they meet regularly, comforting each other and standing together for hours watching the dancing lights of the nearby city.”

    The photographer spent three nights with the penguin colony to capture this very moment.

    “Between not being able or allowed to use any lights and the tiny penguins continuously moving, rubbing their flippers on each other’s backs and cleaning one another, it was really hard to get a shot,” he said.

    “But I got lucky during one beautiful moment.”

  • Indian police arrest Muslim teen under ‘love jihad’ for walking home with Hindu friend

    Indian police arrest Muslim teen under ‘love jihad’ for walking home with Hindu friend

    The Indian police in Uttar Pradesh arrested a Muslim teenager for walking home with his former classmate, a Dalit girl, from a birthday party after a case was registered for ‘love jihad’ under the state’s new ‘anti-conversion’ law. The boy has been in the custody for a week. 

    The Love Jihad law in India is an Islamophobic conspiracy theory alleging that Muslim men target women belonging to non-Muslim communities for conversion to Islam by feigning love.

    According to details, the 16-year-old girl has constantly rubbished the allegations of ‘love jihad‘, telling the police that the boy was a friend of hers.

    “I have told this to the magistrate and I will say this again. Those men had a problem with me walking with my friend. They made videos of me and are now calling it love jihad. I did nothing wrong. I went of my own free will.” 

    The complaint was allegedly registered by the girl’s father and stated that the accused “induced the girl to elope with him” with the “intention to marry and convert her”.

    However, the girl’s father has denied filing any complaint.

    “I trust my daughter completely. What wrong did she do? Why must she be made part of politics? Is it unlawful for a boy and a girl to walk together now?”

    As per details, the two were walking home from a friend’s birthday party around 10 pm on December 14 when they were allegedly chased by a group of right-wing Hindu men, beaten with sticks and questioned. When the group came to know that the two belong to different religions, they forced them to go to a police station.

    The Muslim boy works as a welder’s apprentice in Dehradun. The police say he is 18 years old but his family says is 17. They have no documents to prove his age.

    “The accused is in judicial custody. If he is a minor, they will have to produce documents to show that. We have invoked appropriate sections in this case after questioning the girl and based on her father’s complaint,” Station House Officer, Dhampur Arun Kumar told The Indian Express.

  • Airline flies passengers to wrong destination

    Airline flies passengers to wrong destination

    A Nepali airline flew its passengers to the wrong destination. Sixty-six passengers who booked their flights to Janakpur reached Pokhara instead.

    As per reports, Buddha Air, a domestic airline, flew from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu to Pokhara that lies on the northwest side of the country instead of its assigned destination Janakpur, which is in the southern part of the country. The two cities are more than 400-kilometers away from each other.

    An executive officer at the airline Astha Basnet said that the confusion happened due to “lapses in communication and failure to follow detailed standard operating procedure.”

    The airline made the arrangements for the passengers to reach the actual destination. Even though there are no direct flights between Pokhara and Janakpur, the airline was granted special permission to fly there.

    The commuters reached their destination Janakpur a few hours late than the schedule. No mechanical issues with the plane were reported.

    The officials confirmed that the airport staff will receive additional training after the error.

  • Canadian-Muslim’s ‘anthropological observations’ on Christmas go viral

    Canadian-Muslim’s ‘anthropological observations’ on Christmas go viral

    A Muslim man in Canada, who could not go to his family over the holidays due to the lockdown celebrated Christmas, for the first time and his heart-warming Twitter thread of ‘observations’ has gone viral on social media.

    Mohammad Hussain, who works as a special assistant for parliamentary affairs at the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry, expressing his views on the holidays said: “Growing up, my Muslim family never celebrated Christmas.”

    “This year I am not going home, because pandemic, so my roommates are teaching me how to have my first proper Christmas,” he continued. “I am approaching this with anthropological precision.”

    Hussain then listed a few things he had observed about the way his roommates celebrated the event.

    Hussain remarked that people spent more than their budget and that people had Christmas tree ornaments that were either ‘fillers’ or ‘keepers’.

    “The fillers are the generic ones. The keepers are meant to be more special and unique. This second stream is stored in your family’s reliquary to be one day passed on to the children,” he shared.

    Encouraged by his roommates to buy his own ‘keeper’ ornament, he bought a bagel decoration and was clearly not happy with the cost of it.

    “That cost me $15.99. That’s more than three everything bagels. I am furious,” he wrote. “For what it cost, you best believe that I am insisting that it be passed on to my great grandchildren. If they break it I will haunt them.”

    Hussain concluded his post by applauding Christmas celebrators. “This is a lot of work and very tiring.”

    “I will say I am having a very pleasant time. I am learning that I enjoy Christmas music and gift purchasing. I am also learning that I do not enjoy peppermint.”

    Hussain’s Twitter thread was liked by 170,000 people in less than 24 hours and widely shared on social media.

  • COVID-19 reaches the last continent

    COVID-19 has finally reached Antarctica, making it the last continent to be hit by the pandemic.

    Thirty-six people on the continent tested positive for the novel virus. Of those infected, 26 are members of the Chilean army and 10 are civilian maintenance personnel.

    According to Chile’s army and health ministry officials, infected patients were evacuated to the city of Punta Arenas where they have been put in isolation and are under “constant monitoring”.

    Chilean officials are investigating how the virus reached there, said a spokesman for the Health Ministry. He said that so far none of the infected men have had severe symptoms.

  • 3,184 people accept Islam in UAE during 2020

    3,184 people accept Islam in UAE during 2020

    The Mohammad bin Rashid Centre for Islamic Culture has recently revealed that 3,184 people converted to Islam this year. All the requests for conversion to Islam were received online during  the current COVID-19 pandemic.

    According to the details. Hind Mohammed Lootah, the Director of the center, said the institution would keep on delivering the right message about Islam and spread its lofty principles among people of different faiths and communities living in Dubai.

    The center is in contact with new converts to Islam and provides them with numerous services such as religious, social, cultural and educational.  The center receives online requests for conversion on its website www.iacad.gov.ae, or through the free-toll number 800600.

  • Kid spends over Rs 2.5 million on video game from mother’s credit card

    A six-year-old boy in the United States who loves playing video games spent nearly $16,000 (Rs 2570393) from his mother’s credit card to buy additional features on his favourite video game Sonic Forces.

    According to reports, Jessica discovered that the transactions worth $16,000 were made in July when her son had started using the iPad for his games and bought add-ons on the games.

    Some of the major transactions were made on July 8 when her son made purchases worth $2,500 on a single day.

    Unaware of the financial burden of her son’s virtual shopping over the month of July, his mother registered fraud claims after she saw that Apple and Paypal were withdrawing huge sums of money from her account.

    However, it was only in October that she got to know that the charges were hers and she needed to get in touch with Apple.

    On blaming Apple, she said that her son did not understand that the money was real.

  • Teachers should receive vaccine priority: UNICEF

    Teachers should receive vaccine priority: UNICEF

    The head of the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, has said that teachers should be among those given priority access to the COVID-19 vaccines.

    “The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on children’s education around the globe. Vaccinating teachers is a critical step towards putting it back on track,” Unicef chief Henrietta Fore said in a statement.

    Teachers should be “prioritised to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, once frontline health personnel and high-risk populations are vaccinated,” she said.

    “This will help protect teachers from the virus, allow them to teach in person and ultimately keep schools open.”

    According to UNICEF, at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic at the end of April, “school closures disturbed the learning of almost 90% of students worldwide.”

    Assuming that schools are not the main driver of community transmission, Unicef said in its statement that unfortunately, classes currently remain closed for “nearly one in five schoolchildren globally — or 320 million children.”

    We must “do everything in our power to safeguard the future of the next generation. This begins by safeguarding those responsible for opening that future up for them,” Fore said.

    “The consequences of extended, missed or impaired education are steep, especially for the most marginalized. The longer children remain out of school, the less likely they are to return, and the more difficult it is for their parents to resume work,” she said.

  • Alligator rumoured to be Hitler’s pet to be preserved forever

    Alligator rumoured to be Hitler’s pet to be preserved forever

    An alligator believed to have belonged to German dictator Adolf Hitler has been preserved after dying at the age of 84 at a zoo in Moscow.  

    According to the details, the alligator, Saturn, died in May and the reptile’s skin was donated to the Moscow’ Darwin Museum. The alligator will be put on display after work by taxidermists at the zoo in the new year. Taxidermy is the art of preserving an animal’s body via mounting or stuffing.

    Known to have been a pre-war star attraction at Berlin Zoo in Nazi Germany, the story also dispersed that the reptile had been in the Hitler’s personal pet collection, as suggested by famous Russian writer Boris Akunin. Dmitry Vasilyev, a vet at Moscow Zoo also said that there was no doubt that Hitler admired the alligator.

    The alligator was born in the wild in Mississippi in 1936 before being caught and sent to Berlin Zoo.