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circus freaks Legal reforms alone cannot bring about equality, societal acceptance and political will are also needed, said lawyers and authors Saurabh Kirpal, Malavika Rajkotia and Somya Singh. The session "Equality Code" discussed patriarchy, judicial activism , and the fight for equality in society. Somya said the decriminalisation of Section 377 was a positive step but not the final answer. "Judicial activism isn't enough. We need a cultural and political push," she said. Kirpal spoke about how violence against women is often seen as normal. "We normalise violence, whether it's a casual slap or the lack of laws on marital rape," he said. Maharashtra Jharkhand Maharashtra Alliance View i Party View Seats: 288 Results Majority: 145 BJP+ 229 MVA 47 OTH 12 Results : 288 / 288 BJP+ WON Jharkhand Alliance View i Party View Seats: 81 Results Majority: 41 INDIA 56 NDA 24 OTH 1 Results : 81 / 81 INDIA WON Source: PValue Rajkotia said women too play a role in upholding patriarchal norms, often enforcing restrictions in their families. The panel agreed that replacing patriarchy with matriarchy is not the solution. They called for inclusivity in both laws and society.Furthermore, it is imperative to exercise empathy and understanding towards all individuals involved in the incident. The female master’s graduate, as well as the male acquaintance, deserve to have their voices heard and their perspectives considered. Jumping to conclusions and passing judgment without adequate evidence only serves to fan the flames of controversy and perpetuate misunderstanding.

Each moment a spark that burns.

One morning last March, tens of millions of people in West Africa woke up to find they had no more internet. Hospitals were shut out of patient records. Business owners couldn’t pay wages. In homes and on sidewalks, people stared at the wheel icon rolling endlessly on their screens. “Connecting,” it promised. It wasn’t. People remained disconnected — some for hours, many for days. “It created panic all over,” said Kwabena Agadzi, head of communication technology at one of Ghana’s largest insurance companies, Starlife. “As if the world was coming to an end.” In the absence of hard information, rumors flew. It was a coup, some said. It was sabotage, said others. Even those who guessed what was really happening knew that identifying the problem and fixing it were two very different things. Despite its name, the Trou Sans Fond — the Bottomless Hole, in French — a sinuous canyon carved into the continental shelf off Ivory Coast, does have a bottom. It’s just very, very deep down. The chasm begins near the coastline with a precipitous drop of nearly 3,000 feet. Nested in the murky water at the bottom, at times some 2 miles deep, and buffeted by powerful currents lie cables that provide internet service across West Africa. Many nations use cables like these, but for emerging economies with limited alternatives, they are a lifeline to the rest of the world. On the morning of March 14, there was a big problem. Cables on the floor of the Trou Sans Fond began going offline. When the fourth went out, some five hours after the first, people in a dozen countries got an unwelcome reminder: No one is truly untethered. “The more we rely on our phones to get everything done, the more we forget how we connect,” said Jennifer Counter, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “But there’s still a cable somewhere.” Some know this all too well. When cables malfunction, it is their job to wrest them from the muck of the seabed, splice them together and lower them back down, thrumming once again with data. And so the day after the trouble at the bottom of the Bottomless Hole, the Léon Thévenin, a 41-year-old, 107-meter repair ship based in Cape Town, South Africa, prepared to set sail. Ahead lay a voyage of about 10 days up Africa’s western coast. Any number of things can knock an undersea cable out of service. Landslides can do it. So can a ship dragging its anchor. There may be unintended damage from military skirmishes. And then there is sabotage, a growing concern. But most components of the physical internet are privately owned, and the companies behind them have very little incentive to explain any failures. That can make it daunting for people who rely on the cables to try to get a handle on why an outage is happening. Especially in real time. On March 14, the regional chief information officer for the Ecobank Group in Ivory Coast knew only one thing for sure as he stared at signals blipping red in his offices: There was a problem. Still, it was early in the day. Banks were not due to open for another 30 minutes. That was probably enough time, figured the information officer, Issouf Nikiema, for his IT engineers to sort it out. Those hopes faded when the techs came back to his office in Abidjan. “Even their body language — I realized that something was really wrong,” Nikiema said. Ecobank alone serves 28 million people across the continent. But many other businesses, from sprawling bank chains to modest food stands, were hit, especially after the fourth cable went out and the internet went into free fall. Africa is a continent of 1.4 billion people where economic ambitions are high but the infrastructure often lags. People have learned the art of the workaround, and so when the electricity fails, generators often come to the rescue. If the Wi-Fi goes down, mobile data might still do the trick. But this time was different. In many places, the shutdown was total. “Imagine waking up in New York with no Wi-Fi at home, no data on your phone, no internet available at your local Starbucks, at your office, no way to check your bank accounts on your Chase app,” said Sarah Coulibaly, a technology expert at Ivory Coast’s national telecommunications agency. In Accra, Ghana’s capital, international travelers arriving at the airport could not locate their rental cars. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s largest city, restaurants couldn’t use WhatsApp to order local produce. And more than 500 miles away in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third-largest city, Oke Iyanda couldn’t collect money for the food that she sells to students and university workers. Sales of abula, a popular mix of yam powder, vegetables, pepper stew and goat meat, plummeted and food spoiled. The failures highlighted a broader problem for African countries: For all their technological progress, they are served by far fewer cables than more developed countries are, and often lack backup systems. By contrast, when two data cables linking four European countries were cut in quick succession in the Baltic Sea last month, service interruptions were relatively minimal. (American intelligence officials assessed that the cables had not been cut deliberately, but the European authorities have not ruled out sabotage.) For Africa, some help is on the way. Starlink’s satellite internet technology now operates in at least 15 countries, and a 28,000-mile-long cable being built by a consortium of companies has begun to come online. Still, the continent’s dependence on private — and for the most part Western — internet providers can make true sovereignty elusive. “We’re at the mercy of these cable operators,” said Kalil Konaté, Ivory Coast’s minister for digital transition. (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) For an Uber driver in, say, Stockholm or Buenos Aires, an internet outage is a big inconvenience. In Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, it can mean calamity. With his clients locked out of their bank accounts, one driver there, Segun Oladejoye, said he went without work for three days. The timing could hardly have been worse. Months earlier, Oladejoye, a 46-year-old father of four, had taken out a loan for his Uber car. With barely any savings, the only way he could pay back the $30 weekly installment and feed his family was through even longer hours of work. Worried that the lending company might seize his car, Oladejoye said, he borrowed still more money, this time from a Chinese lending app. “It still hurts me and my family,” he said, “because I now have to pay back both loans.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) According to Telegeography, an internet data and mapping company, there are hundreds of cables crossing the floors and canyons of the earth’s oceans. Stretched end to end, they would reach approximately 1 million miles. Though not dramatically different in appearance from the slender cables a local TV provider would run into an apartment building, at any moment they are conveying a vast number of messages, from WhatsApp flirtations to complex financial transactions. People have been laying cables underwater since the dawn of the telegraph age in the mid-1800s, but those being put down now bear little resemblance to their forebears. At the center of modern cables are fiber-optic lines, usually numbering four to 24 fibers. Thinner than a human hair, each is coated with a different color so they don’t get mixed up. The composition of the cables depends in part on the depth of the water, said Verne Steyn, director of subsea networks at WIOCC, a major digital wholesaler in Africa. In deepwater locations, the cables often have a black outer polyethylene layer. Below is a wrap of metal tape, then another polyethylene layer, a copper sleeve to conduct electricity, and a tangle of stainless steel wires to provide strength. Only then comes a small metal tube holding the fiber-optic lines, which are often coated with glycerin jelly as a last protection against the water. The result is a remarkably sturdy conduit — but not an invulnerable one. And in a world ever more dependent on the uninterrupted flow of data, that worries people. (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) Just weeks before the cables went out in the Trou Sans Fond, cables in the Red Sea serving East Africa and Asia were severed by a ship’s anchor. They were a casualty of war: The ship had been hit by a missile fired by militants in Yemen backing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. And about two months later, two more cables were torn apart in shallow waters off Mozambique by a fishing trawler. Its crew had reportedly switched off its tracking system so it could operate in protected waters. (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) Some communications experts argue that the way to make internet infrastructure more resilient to the inevitable problems is redundancy — just lay more cables, so there are more alternative pathways for data, and that has happened. Twenty years ago, for example, there were just two major cables strung along the West African coast, according to Steyn. But sometimes, that just means more cables are cut at once. “The seabed is not as peaceful as it once was,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network monitoring company. “Just adding more cables doesn’t solve all your problems. The fact of today’s internet is that we’ve got to survive multiple cable cuts in a single incident.” It might be better, he and other experts say, to diversify the location of the cables and set up more on land, though that can be more expensive and pose geopolitical challenges. And more cables can do only so much. Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo, said that there were mounting, credible reports of sabotage around the world. “I believe that the infrastructure is highly vulnerable and presents an attractive target,” Zysk said. Sabotage did not, however, appear to play a role in the outage in the Trou San Fond, analyses of the crews that eventually repaired the cables and independent experts interviewed by The New York Times said. To try to understand what happened, Madory, a pathologist of sorts for the undersea communication network, used clues from the internet’s global addressing system, known as BGP, and the network’s attempts to route traffic around the broken connections. He was able to pinpoint the time of the first cable failure at 5:02 a.m. local time. The three others followed at 5:31, 7:45 and 10:33. “You can see in the routing system a little scramble as the rest of the internet tries to figure out how to reach these networks,” Madory said. The cascade of failures offers strong evidence that the culprit was almost certainly one of the underwater mudslides or avalanches — scientists call them turbidity currents — that are fairly common in that region. As the Léon Thévenin steamed northward along the coast, it was outfitted with a curious mix of old and new. Coiled in its belly were miles of replacement cable and heavy rope. Steel grapnels were fastened to lengths of chain that would be dragged along the sea bottom to snag broken cables and haul them to the surface. The master of the ship, Capt. Benoît Petit, delicately rolled out huge charts — they resembled scrolls — showing the broad topography of the Trou Sans Fond. But there was also high-tech splicing equipment, and needles on dials in the ship’s work areas quivered as amber, red and green lights flashed. Always on call, with sailors rotating in and out to keep the active crew at about 55, the Léon Thévenin is one of six repair ships operated by Orange Marine, a subsidiary of Orange, the French telecommunications giant. Orange Marine says it carries out 12% to 15% of the roughly 200 cable repairs that take place around the world each year. Crew members sometimes have trouble making their families and friends online understand what they do on long voyages. “I say it straight: ‘I’m a fiber optics splicer,’” said Shuru Arendse. “What is that?” comes the reply, so he tries again. “I repair the data communication cables on the seabed.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.) But still no. So Arendse keeps it simple. “I keep Africa connected to the rest of the world,” he says. But before he can, his crew has to find the cable breaks — no easy task. (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) Frédéric Salle, the onboard mission chief, regards each repair as a forensic investigation and each break as a “crime scene,” even if malfeasance is not suspected. But the evidence in this case would have to be deduced from surveys, charts and hauling up the cable itself rather than imagery of the sea bottom. The waters of the Trou Sans Fond were too deep and the canyon walls too steep to send down a camera-laden remote vehicle. Didier Dillard, the chief executive of Orange Marine, said the crews operated in a world of the unknown. “When you go beyond 1,000 meters depth,” he said, “nobody really knows what the seabed is like, because nobody goes there. It can be rocky, sandy, muddy — you can just imagine.” But there were clues to where the breaks the Léon Thévenin was looking for might be, and what had caused them. The cables’ depth put them out of reach of passing fishing nets or anchors. And Salle determined that they had broken in order from closest to the coastline to farthest — strong evidence that there had been an avalanche, since that was the direction one would speed down the slope of the canyon. Another sign: Light signals sent through the fiber optics revealed that the break was squarely within the canyon, where avalanches occur, Salle said. “There was no doubt as to the identity of ‘the perpetrator,’” he said. The repair itself, Salle said, involved cutting the cables on either side of the breaks and fastening them to buoys. Then jointers got to work splicing a length of new cable into place. First stripping off the colored coating, they carefully melted and joined the strands from two cable pieces — the microsurgery of internet repair — checking to be sure that laser light was flowing freely across the repaired joint. They boxed it all up into an elaborate splint. Then it was time to drop the cable back into the sea and move on to the others. When the last cable was patched, about a month after the crew left South Africa, it was time to head home. With the breaks repaired, internet service returned to normal in West Africa — but “normal” is relative. Outages, though shorter, remain frequent. And some think another cable-snapping avalanche is just a matter of time. Konaté, the Ivorian digital transition minister, said that the March outage was a wake-up call and that he had asked cable providers like Google to offer terrestrial backup solutions. “This cannot happen again,” he said. (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.) In the port of Cape Town, another Orange Marine mission chief, Didier Mainguy, said that for all the lasers and fiber optics, little had changed fundamentally from a century and a half ago. To make his point, Mainguy held up a mounted piece of old telegraph cable in his quarters. “It’s still a cable,” he said. “It was a cable a hundred years ago. Voilà.”

Lisa Simpson once said during an episode of “The Simpsons:” What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football? On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined. The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast. The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season. The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay. “We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.” While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football. Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters. “That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation. This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars. “The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999. Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+. The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque. The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.” There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith. The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements. The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins. “Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof. The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months. “That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said. Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys. The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology. For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles. “I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.” Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe. “We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy -- he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly. “If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.” AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

As Wang Chuqin continues to lead the charge for Chinese table tennis, fans around the world eagerly await his next match, eager to witness his incredible skill and talent on display. His journey to the top has been marked by countless hours of practice, sacrifice, and determination, and his success serves as an inspiration to aspiring table tennis players everywhere.Throughout the trial, emotions ran high, with supporters of the victim's family holding vigils and demonstrations outside the courthouse, calling for justice and accountability. The prosecution argued that the Marine's actions were unjustified and constituted excessive force, leading to the untimely death of an innocent man.As the community attempts to make sense of the incident and come to terms with the implications of such a shocking turn of events, questions and concerns remain as to how such a situation could have occurred in the first place. Calls for stricter regulations and measures to prevent similar occurrences in the future have been voiced, as the public grapples with the harsh reality of the vulnerability of individuals, even in seemingly safe environments.

Athletic Bilbao, under the leadership of Muniain, have been in impressive form this season, consistently challenging some of the top teams in La Liga and Europe. Muniain's leadership on the field has been instrumental in guiding his team to important victories and maintaining a strong position in the league standings.