India’s cricket governing body BCCI, after toying with the idea of starting a women’s version of the Indian Premier League for years, has finally decided to implement it.

BCCI President Sourav Ganguly and IPL Governing Council Chairman Brijesh Patel have confirmed plans to launch a Women’s IPL next year although a final decision is pending. 

Apart from the need to make the IPL and cricket, in general, more inclusive, there has been growing chorus of star India players calling for a women’s IPL.

They believe it will act as a launchpad for young domestic women cricketers, who can gain the exposure they need as they play with overseas players.

Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma and ​​Jemimah Rodrigues have argued for a Women’s IPL,  and so has England captain Heather Knight.

The BCCI has been waiting for the right moment, when it makes economic sense for them to take up the project.

It has been organising exhibition games of the Women’s T20 Challenge since 2018 alongside the men’s IPL. After being suspended in 2021, it is returning this year with  four matches involving three teams around the men’s playoffs.

The 2020 edition of the Women’s T20 Challenge recorded 5.34 billion minutes in viewership in India, which is a 140% increase over the previous editions, according to BARC data.

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South Korean tech conglomerate Samsung has announced that its Galaxy S9 and Samsung Galaxy S9+ smartphones will no longer receive software updates.

According to GSM Arena, the early 2018 flagships are now off Samsung’s lists of devices eligible for security updates.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy S10 series were moved from monthly to quarterly updates, now that they are over 3 years old.

The Galaxy S9 series is following the path of its predecessors as back in early 2021, Samsung demoted the S9 from monthly to quarterly security updates, when the Galaxy S8 was completely taken off the list. The same thing had happened to the Galaxy S7 phones a year earlier.

As per GSM Arena, the Galaxy S9 series’ last major update was to One UI 2.5 package, which it received in late 2020.

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Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and power Twitter user who is now Twitter’s largest shareholder and newly appointed board member, may have thoughts on a long-standing request from users: Should there be an edit button?

On Monday evening, Musk launched a Twitter poll about whether they want an edit button, cheekily misspelling yes as yse and no as on. More than 3 million people had voted as of Tuesday morning. The poll closes Tuesday evening Eastern time.

Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, retweeted the poll with a seeming reference to an earlier tweet by Musk. , saying The consequences of this poll will be important,” he wrote. “Please vote carefully. Musk had used the same language in a March tweet describing another one of his polls that asked whether Twitter adheres to free speech principles.

Twitter spokesperson Catherine Hill declined to comment on whether Agrawal was joking, and did not answer whether Twitter would follow the results of Musk’s poll. Musk tweeted Tuesday that he was looking forward to making significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!

Many Twitter users among them, Kim Kardashian, Ice T, Katy Perry and McDonald’s corporate account have long begged for an edit button. The company itself recently teased users with an April Fool’s Day tweet saying we are working on an edit button.

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Edge data centres, as the name suggest, are located at the edge of the network. They are relatively smaller facilities placed close to the population they serve. And, their job is to deliver cached content and cloud computing resources to end-users.This enables edge computing, which involves processing data and services as close to the end-user as possible.

This also allows a company, say a telecom services provider, to improve its customer experience.Typically, edge data centres are connected to larger central data centres or even multiple data centres.But, one may ask: That’s all wonderful, but why is this important to me? And, what’s new about this? The answer lies in the role edge computing and edge data centres will play when it comes to 5G.Let’s go back to the concept of edge computing.Edge computing is a distributed IT architecture wherein data is processed as close to the originating source as possible.Because the processing takes place close to the end-users, services are delivered faster and with minimal latency. ‘Fast services’ and ‘minimal latency’ – Where else are these terms used prominently? 5G, of course.When it comes to 5G, a decentralised cell network composed of edge data centres will provide low latency in use cases involving high device density.And, it is this low latency, apart from higher data speeds, that will be the gamechanger.Latency is a measure of the time between the sending of a piece of information and the corresponding response.

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Leisure hospitality player Sterling Holiday Resorts Ltd on Monday said it has appointed Vikram Lalvani as its new Managing Director and CEO with effect from April 1, 2022.

He takes over from Ramesh Ramanathan, who continues to be the Chairman of the company, Sterling Holiday Resorts said in a statement.

In his previous role as COO, of Sterling Holidays, Lalvani has been responsible for successfully strengthening the preferred partners’ network, launching new revenue focused projects, spearheading the expansion plans across the country which now includes 38 plus resorts in operation and many more in the pipe-line, it added.

Commenting on the appointment, Ramanathan said, “We are confident that Vikram’s vast experience in the hospitality industry will be a huge advantage for us. His energy, passion and eye for detail will also boost the team in delivering exceptional services and make Sterling the preferred brand for our guests.”

Lalvani has over 25 years of leadership experience in hospitality, leisure and ITeS industries. He held crucial positions in companies such as Indian Hotels Co Ltd and Sutherland Global Services, the company said.

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An IndiGo Nagpur-Lucknow flight returned to the origin after take-off following a suspected momentary technical snag, said the airline on Monday.

The airline further informed that all the passengers were safe after the return of the flight to Nagpur airport.

“IndiGo’s Nagpur-Lucknow flight, returned to origin after take-off, following a suspected momentary technical snag, today. The pilots followed the standard operating procedures and returned safely to Nagpur airport. All passengers are safe,” said the airline.

Following the incident, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation ordered an inquiry into the emergency landing of the IndiGo flight at Nagpur airport after smoke was seen coming out of the aircraft, said a senior DGCA official.

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The government on Thursday kept interest rates on small savings schemes, including NSC and PPF, unchanged for the first quarter of 2022-23 due to an elevated level of inflation.

The interest rate has not been revised since the first quarter of 2020-21.

Public Provident Fund (PPF) and National Savings Certificate (NSC) will continue to carry an annual interest rate of 7.1 per cent and 6.8 per cent, respectively, in the first quarter.

“The rate of interest on various small savings schemes for the first quarter of the financial year 2022-23, starting from April 1, 2022, and ending on June 30, 2022, shall remain unchanged from the current rates applicable for the fourth quarter (January 1, 2022, to March 31, 2022) for FY 2021-22,” the finance ministry said in a notification.

Interest rates for small savings schemes are notified on a quarterly basis.

The one-year term deposit scheme will continue to earn an interest rate of 5.5 per cent in the first quarter of the next fiscal, while the girl child savings scheme Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana account will earn 7.6 per cent.

The interest rate on the five-year senior citizens’ savings scheme will be retained at 7.4 per cent. The interest on the senior citizens’ scheme is paid quarterly.

The interest rate on savings deposits will continue to be 4 per cent per annum.

Term deposits of one to five years will fetch an interest rate in the range of 5.5-6.7 per cent, to be paid quarterly, while the interest rate on five-year recurring deposits will earn a higher interest of 5.8 per cent.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared in a video message at the Grammy Awards to ask for support in telling the story of Ukraine’s invasion by Russia.

During the message that aired on the show Sunday, he likened the invasion to a deadly silence threatening to extinguish the dreams and lives of the Ukrainian people, including children.

Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them, he said.

But the music will break through anyway.

The Recording Academy, with its partner Global Citizen, prior to the ceremony highlighted a social media campaign called Stand Up For Ukraine to raise money and support during the humanitarian crisis.

Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV, support us in any way you can any, but not silence. And then peace will come to all our cities, Zelenskyy said.

Following Zelenskyy’s message, John Legend performed his song Free with Ukrainian musicians Siuzanna Iglidan and Mika Newton, and poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, as images from the war were shown on screens behind them.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared in a video message at the Grammy Awards to ask for support in telling the story of Ukraine’s invasion by Russia.

During the message that aired on the show Sunday, he likened the invasion to a deadly silence threatening to extinguish the dreams and lives of the Ukrainian people, including children.

Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them, he said.

But the music will break through anyway.

The Recording Academy, with its partner Global Citizen, prior to the ceremony highlighted a social media campaign called Stand Up For Ukraine to raise money and support during the humanitarian crisis.

Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV, support us in any way you can any, but not silence. And then peace will come to all our cities, Zelenskyy said.

Following Zelenskyy’s message, John Legend performed his song Free with Ukrainian musicians Siuzanna Iglidan and Mika Newton, and poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, as images from the war were shown on screens behind them.

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Fans of Lata Mangeshkar are disappointed after the melody queen was not included in the ‘In Memoriam’ section of the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

The absence of the legendary Indian playback singer from the 2022 Grammys ceremony, held on early Monday morning in Las Vegas, comes a week after the Academy Awards left out Mangeshkar from its homage segment as well.

Mangeshkar, the voice of generations of Indians, died on January 6 due to multiple organ failure. She was 92.

The fans took to Twitter to criticise the Recording Academy, the institution that conducts Hollywood’s biggest musical awards night, for omitting Mangeshkar’s name.

Calling out the Grammys for honouring only American music, a user said the event felt “futile and insignificant”.

“A little unrelated, but when they were paying tributes to artists who passed away this year and there was no mention of Lata Mangeshkar- India’s most loved singer, it all felt so futile and insignificant. These shows have no regard for ‘global’ music- only American.”

Another wrote: “So both the Oscars and the Grammys failed to honor the late great Lata Mangeshkar in their respective memoriam segments? That’s a shame. #GrammyAwards #Oscars”

A tweeple said not just Mangeshkar, the Grammys also left out veteran music composer Bappi Lahiri (69). Lahiri died of obstructive sleep apnea on January 15, days after Mangeshkar’s demise.

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