Latest news with #Out
The Hill
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Democrat: Trump two-week Iran deadline ‘not a bad thing'
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) tepidly praised President Trump on his handling of the ongoing military conflict between Israel and Iran, after the president said he would wait two weeks to decide whether to take direct action against Iran. 'The fact that we're not reading about a U.S. attack on Iran right now actually gives me a little bit of comfort,' the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee told independent broadcaster Jim Acosta in an interview posted online Thursday. Trump said in a statement that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt read to reporters during Thursday's press briefing that there is 'substantial chance of negotiation that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future.' 'I will make my decision whether or not to go in the next two weeks,' the president said. The announcement prompted Trump's critics to revive the TACO meme, short for 'Trump Always Chickens Out,' and accuse the president of frequently falling back to a two-week timeline for decisions — regardless of their importance. 'We can sort of joke about TACO, and you know everything is two weeks or four weeks or never, but I think when you're talking about war in the Middle East, going slower than rather than faster is not a bad thing,' Himes said. The United Nations Security Council is meeting Friday to discuss the ongoing strikes between Israel and Iran as the conflict enters its second week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, met with Britain's foreign secretary Thursday to discuss potential diplomatic off-ramps. Himes told Acosta that he thinks there is still time to work out an agreement before the U.S. military jumps into the war. 'The advice I would give the president is, you are in a point of maximum leverage right now, and the regime has been badly hurt, badly embarrassed,' Himes said, describing the U.S.'s ability to negotiate a deal on Iran's nuclear future. 'They're probably worried about what's gonna happen inside Iran with the Iranian people.'
Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Ex-minister's son stopped at airport; arrested for cheating sister of ₹17cr
Chennai: Former AIADMK minister Shanmuganathan's son, Raja Shanmuganathan, who is also a councillor in Tuticorin, was intercepted and arrested at Chennai airport in connection with a ₹17 crore cheating case, moments before boarding a flight to Malaysia. A lookout circular was pending against Raja Shanmuganathan. He is AIADMK's 59th ward councillor and Thoothukudi Corporation's opposition leader, and faces a case of for cheating his sister of ₹17 crore by misusing her property under the pretext of offering company shares. In her complaint, Ponnarasi Ashokkumar, 38, said her brother Raja and his wife Anusha lured her into investing in their company, Omeena Pharma Distributors Pvt Ltd, by promising her 16% equity. To facilitate this, they mortgaged securities and bonds belonging to her late husband, and pledged her two-acre land in Sriperumbudur. Using these assets, they secured a loan of ₹11 crore in the name of the company, which was later diverted to another company — Ashun Exim — owned by Raja. Raja also made Ponnarasi to invest in a quarry business named Golden Blue Metals Pvt Ltd in Thoothukudi. She allegedly handed over 300 sovereigns of gold jewellery, which Raja pledged to raise funds. Using these funds, he reportedly purchased around 40 acres of land in Thoothukudi, and registered it in his own name. Investigations revealed that instead of honouring the agreement to share profits or provide equity, Raja and Anusha forged documents to illegally transfer the company's shares to Raja. They fabricated a resignation letter in Ponnarasi's name and uploaded it to the Registrar of Companies (ROC), removing her from her position as director of Golden Blue Metals Pvt Ltd and appointing Anusha in her place. Based on Ponnarasi's complaint, the central crime branch registered a case and began investigations. Police also issued a Look Out Circular (LOC) against Raja. Raja was intercepted at the Chennai International Airport On June 10 and was taken into custody for inquiry. He was subsequently arrested and remanded in judicial custody.
The Hindu
6 days ago
- Science
- The Hindu
Humid phases once turned Arabian desert into a lush paradise: study
The region called Arabia sits at the heart of the earth's driest deserts, stretching from the Sahara in the west to India's Thar Desert in the east. It holds the distinction of being the largest biogeographical barrier on the planet. Over millennia, the arid conditions of the Saharo-Arabian Desert are expected to have prevented hominins and wildlife from migrating between Africa and Eurasia. Research has found that this arid barrier has existed for at least 11 million years. Then again, fossil evidence from the late Miocene and the Pleistocene epochs has suggested that water-dependent animals like crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and horses roamed the region as recently as 74,000 years ago. The two facts raise a curious idea: could Arabia, the formidable wall of dryness, have once been a more nourishing land? Mineral deposits uncovered recently in the caves of central Saudi Arabia have bolstered this possibility: that Arabia was indeed once part of a lush green landscape that, among other things, allowed animals — including our ancestors — to migrate through as they spread out of Africa. According to the researchers who studied the deposits, the cause of this lushness was intermittent phases of humidity the region experienced in the last eight million years, which gradually turned a desiccated landscape into a well-watered grassland. Their findings were recently published in Nature. In search of Green Arabia 'I visited Saudi Arabia as part of a Fulbright award. I was curious why no one was integrating Arabia into the Out of Africa story and wanted to assess the situation firsthand myself. At the time, I was working in India and I had hypothesised that movements out of Africa would have been across the Arabia-India zone,' Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, leader of the 'Green Arabia' project, and a coauthor of the study, said. The research team itself was international and was supported by the Saudi Heritage Commission in the kingdom's Ministry of Culture. For years, researchers believed that the Arabian Peninsula had always been a barren land with a foreboding environment and where humans had only settled a few thousand years ago, especially once they had managed to domesticate animals like camels and goats. This belief kept Arabia firmly out of theories of 'Out of Africa' — a popular model that suggests modern humans originated in Africa and then migrated to the rest of the world. The 'Green Arabia' hypothesis cuts through this belief and suggests that this now-arid land had the occasional humid or rainy phases that transformed it into a wet and verdant terrain, crisscrossed with rivers and lakes and capable of sustaining diverse plant and animal life. From a decade-long quest to accumulate evidence for the 'Green Arabia' idea, Petraglia singled out the Jubbah Oasis, a remnant of an ancient lake in Saudi Arabia. 'As soon as we arrived, we found buried archaeological sites on old lake beds! We have archaeological sites going back 500,000 years now and so we know early human ancestors, and our species, were crossing the area during times of high rainfall. We have now documented a network of rivers and about 10,000 ancient lakes of every age,' he said. The hypothesis is important because the Arabian Peninsula sits at a crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Researchers have expressed hope that understanding past climate in the region can help answer fundamental questions: How did early humans and their ancestors spread across continents? And how did changing environments shape their evolution? Let it drip When water flows through the ground, it sweeps up minerals in the soil along its path. When this mineral-rich water slowly drips into caves, it forms icicle-like formations that hang from the ceiling and rise up from the cave floor. These formations are called speleothems. The researchers collected 22 speleothems from seven cave systems located in central Saudi Arabia. The mere presence of these formations, they said, was evidence of a wetter past because they form in two conditions: sufficient regional rainfall and enough vegetation and soil carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid (which dissolves limestone and triggers speleothem formation). As a result, they added, any changes in humidity, groundwater, and vegetation would have altered the speleothems' structure. These changes are then preserved as the next mineral layer is deposited. Another advantage of using speleothem archives to reconstruct past climates is that they can be accurately dated using routine radiometric methods, such as uranium-thorium and uranium-lead dating. Uranium is a radioactive element and decays into thorium and lead at a fixed rate. This allows scientists to calculate how old a speleothem is by measuring the ratio of uranium to thorium in a sample. Radiometric dating of the mineral formations revealed that over the last eight million years, central Arabia had gone through cycles of wet and dry periods. The earliest sign of a humid phase was between 7.44 million and 6.25 million years ago, and the most recent ones were between 530,000 and 60,000 years ago. These wet phases were often relatively short-lived, lasting only thousands to tens of thousands of years at a time. 'The findings highlighted that precipitation during humid intervals decreased and became more variable over time, as the monsoon's influence weakened, coinciding with enhanced Northern Hemisphere polar ice cover during the Pleistocene,' Monika Markowska, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. The researchers have proposed that these wetter conditions played a pivotal role in helping mammals and early humans migrate between Africa and Eurasia and that the Arabian Peninsula served as a hub of continent-scale biogeographic exchange. The past and the future Archaeological evidence throughout history has indicated that human populations expanded when the climate was wetter and that during dry periods, they either moved to more hospitable areas, even if they were also geographically restricted or simply went extinct. Will history repeat itself as 21st century humankind faces a climate crisis? This is a hard question to answer because human society today is highly technologised. For example, without air-conditioners, people may have already migrated out of regions suffering extreme heat today. That said, the past is more than just about humans. For the last 15 years, another interdisciplinary team of researchers (also involving Petraglia) has been documenting ancient lakes and archaeological sites from 200,000 years ago to the present to track a changing climate and its effects on ecosystems. 'The past holds many lessons for us, as climate and a warming earth is a serious concern to humanity today,' Petraglia said. Sanjukta Mondal is a chemist-turned-science-writer with experience in writing popular science articles and scripts for STEM YouTube channels.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Survivor' winner Luciano Plazibat reacts to the gays flooding his DMs
Between winning Survivor Croatia and going viral with a video of himself singing and dancing to "Abracadabra" by Lady Gaga, this has been a very special Pride Month for Luciano Plazibat. Now, the professional dancer and reality TV heartthrob is spilling some tea about his run on the show, his connection with Lady Gaga, and the response he's been getting from the gays since that viral video. Sign up for the to keep up with what's new in LGBTQ+ culture and entertainment — delivered three times a week straight (well…) to your inbox! "I have to admit that being on Survivor Croatia was never on my wish list, let alone imagining that I could win," Plazibat tells Out. "I always thought Survivor was more for the 'manly men,' for lack of a better word. Guys who excel at sports. And I'm a dancer. This could also be my upbringing talking, but [I thought] a dancer is for Dancing With the Stars, and athletic men go to Survivor." He adds, "I found that being a dancer definitely helped in the physical challenges on the show, so I changed my own mind and proved to myself that I'm capable of different things — even if I didn't necessarily plan for them. Survivor is hard; it was one of the most challenging experiences of my life. But after being on the show, I feel that not much else will be harder than that." Though Plazibat is still recovering from competing on (and winning) Survivor Croatia, the 26-year-old spent the weekend celebrating Zagreb Pride, has his 27th birthday coming up in a week — Monday, June 23 — and wants to attend Tomorrowland this year. "We're the best of friends, but she doesn't know it yet," Plazibat jokes when asked about Mother Monster. "Just kidding!" In reality, the Survivor winner was 10 years old when he first saw Gaga "coming out of that pool in the 'Poker Face' music video," adding: "I thought to myself, 'I need to have that mask, but also those bangs.' And the rest is history; I was a fan ever since." Plazibat says that being a Gaga fan has "kept me going as a dancer" over the years. "I'm still working towards one day performing [with her] and being on stage myself," he explains. "Name any one of her songs and I can dance it out right now." And yet, that creative connection with Gaga actually took an even more personal turn while Plazibat competed on Survivor Croatia. "In week two, some of the contestants made fun of me for being her fan. They even mentioned it as one of the reasons why I should be kicked out… half-jokingly, probably," he recalls. "But, to me, it became like a symbol of staying on Survivor. The longer I stayed, the more I would sing and dance." Plazibat's also proud to reveal that loving Lady Gaga is a family affair. "After two months of being on the show, we received video messages from our families, and my father quoted Lady Gaga in his video message," the Survivor Croatia star notes. "He wanted to motivate me, and send his support, and he knew exactly what to do." Meet Plazibat family😂 #moreenergy #passion #family #fyp The very online gays were introduced to Plazibat through his viral video of "Abracadabra," which was filmed after he had already won Survivor. The Croatian series — airing on Nova TV since 2022 — shared that video on its official Instagram page, which took Plazibat by surprise. "That video was actually filmed before my final interview on the TV studio. We were waiting for the interview to start," he explains. "Me being me, I felt like the room needed some entertainment; a little bit of 'Abracadabra.'" As far as Plazibat knew, he was just trying to entertain himself and the production crew while the equipment was set up for his final interview. Though he was mic'd and knew the cameras were on, he didn't realize that the footage of him singing and dancing "Abracadabra" before his final interview would ever be used. "It was a surprise to me to when the channel decided to post that," he says, adding that he also didn't expect that the video would go so viral. "I was very surprised, but also very happy, that the Little Monster community picked up on it." "Picked up on it" is an understatement: The video has gotten millions of views, and has reached way more people than just Little Monsters. The official Instagram page for Survivor Croatia first shared Plazibat's "Abracadabra" video on Saturday, May 24. Overall, the video has already reached 1.2 million views. On Wednesday, May 28 — just four days later — Plazibat's video was re-shared on X/Twitter and got a new wave of very thirsty (and very queer!) responses. "A contestant on Survivor sang Abracadabra," X/Twitter user @nichblink wrote along with the video, which can be seen below. This clip alone has reached 4.8 million views as of this writing — including 41,000 likes, 8,000 bookmarks, and 3,300 re-shares. Popular responses to the viral X/Twitter video include: "A big ass Chromatica tattoo." — @nichblink"The clap being precisely on beat is so satisfying." — @RandomSisco"Even the bulge was hyped af." — @volevonasceref"He can abracadabra his d*ck in my h*le." — @veterangagastan"Oh he has the choreo DOWN!! He even paused for the slayage at the end." — @MztrGaga"His bulge [face exhaling]." — @everardojnrr"I need him to abra my cadabra." — @cuutehoney"I see some magic I want to do a trick on." — @LosTexasDiablo Plazibat has accumulated 17 million likes and 348,700 followers on TikTok (@lucianoplazibat), 117,000 followers on Instagram (@lucianoplazibat), and 5,000 followers on X/Twitter (@PlazibatLuciano) as of this writing. Specifically, he's gained 9,500 followers on Instagram and 7,000 followers on TikTok since that viral "Abracadabra" video (via Social Blade). When asked about the reception of the video, Plazibat reveals that quite a few gays have been sliding into his DMs. "But who doesn't enjoy a little bit of flirting in the DMs? Or, in this case, a lot of flirting in the DMs." Wildest response to the video so far? "A certain adult movie actor re-posted my video on his story and wrote, 'Marry me.' And that's nice, right? Because usually it's the other way around." And, if anyone's curious, Plazibat confirms during this Out interview that he is indeed gay and single. Even when facing no-so-positive reactions to the viral video, Plazibat remains unbothered — and even friendly. "I figured out why Luciano Plazibat is irritating to me, and the sad truth is because the guy is actually happy, and it radiates from him. I'm just jealous and projecting," X user @trjkvcnkl wrote on Friday, May 30. Plazibat reacted to that X post, writing: "Hahahahaha, Nikola, let's grab some coffee." So, what's next for the Survivor Croatia winner? "Right now I'm taking some time off for the summer," he says. "I have some offers and plans for future projects in the fall, but nothing confirmed yet." "But, whatever I do, I'll see to it that it's always something creative and entertaining for me and for others. Everyone needs a little bit of 'Abracadabra' right now," Plazibat says. Ne znam mogu li bit luđi od ovoga… GLEDAMO SE USKORO!! Na mom instagramu imate više o ovome! Ali zasada dijelim samo ovo!! SURVIVOR 2025 !!! IM BACK 🔥🕷️♥️😂💪🏼 #survivor2025 #survivor #survivorbalkan #survivorhrvatska #survivorserbia
Hans India
13-06-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Farmers Demand Justice: Massive Petition Submitted Over Seed Cotton Exploitation in Gadwal
Gadwal: A large group of seed cotton farmers, under the leadership of NHPS District Chairman Gongalla Ranjith Kumar, submitted a detailed petition to State Agriculture and Farmers Commission Chairman Kodanda Reddy, demanding urgent action against the ongoing exploitation by seed companies and their appointed organizers. The representation was organized by Nadigadda Hakkula Porata Samithi (NHPS) and highlighted the systematic irregularities being faced by over 40,000 farmers cultivating more than 30,000 acres of seed cotton in Jogulamba Gadwal district—one of Telangana's most prominent seed production hubs. Middlemen Replacing Direct Company Contracts Speaking on the occasion, Ranjith Kumar stated that more than 20 seed companies have outsourced operations to "organizers" or middlemen instead of dealing directly with farmers. These organizers, acting on behalf of the companies, are reportedly involved in large-scale exploitation, manipulating payments and engaging in coercive practices. 'Farmers are not receiving payments even after successfully producing high-quality seed cotton. Delays stretch up to 16 months, and excessive interest is deducted on the advances provided during sowing,' Ranjith Kumar said. Allegations of Financial Exploitation and Land Grabbing The petition revealed that farmers are forced to sell their produce through these organizers, who deduct multiple charges: Commissions beyond agreed rates Reductions for alleged damage or shrinkage Interest on advances GOT (Grow Out Test) charges While the Grow Out Test typically takes no more than two months, organizers allegedly delay payment indefinitely under the pretext of pending test results. In some instances, farmers are left waiting for over a year, during which additional interest is deducted without transparency. Even more concerning, the petition cited cases of land grabbing, where organizers allegedly forced farmers to transfer land titles, using coercive tactics and exploiting their financial distress. Demands for Accountability The NHPS and farmers called for: Strict legal and administrative action against companies and organizers involved in these practices. Transparent and direct procurement models between companies and farmers. Enforcement of timely payments post-harvest and completion of GOT. Regulation of interest deductions and commission charges. Investigation into land encroachment cases and restoration of farmers' property rights. Mass Mobilization of Farmers and Activists The petition submission witnessed participation from several farmer leaders and NHPS office bearers: District Convener Buchibabu District Secretary Lavanna Local Leaders: Rangaswamy, Govindu, Vishnu, Balaram Naidu, Prem Raj, Najumulla, Anjaneyulu, Munneppa, Dayakar, Krishna, Ramu, Misala Kistanna, Avanishree, Chinna Ramudu, Amaresh, Gopal, Jamman, Bhupati Naidu, Raghupati, Venkatesh, Ashanna, Anji, K.P. Ramakrishna, Samiyel, and Gajendra. Hundreds of farmers rallied in support, signaling growing unrest and demanding the state government take immediate corrective measures to safeguard the livelihoods and dignity of seed cotton farmers in Gadwal.
