Srinagar, Jan 21: In a bid to showcase local products and create employment opportunities for youth, the Indian Railways here have installed stalls across all 17 stations on the 135 km railway line from Banihal-Baramulla, officials said.
A railway official told the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that the stalls promoting local products under “One station One product” are selling food items, which are unique to the area around the railway stations.
He said the stalls are functional in all the 17 railway stations including Banihal, Hillar Shahabad, Qazigund, Sadoora, Anantnag, Bijbahara, Panzgam, Awantipora, Kakapura, Pampore, Srinagar, Budgam, Mazhama, Pattan, Hamare, Sopore and Baramulla.
He said they have taken this initiative to create additional employment opportunities for underprivileged sections of the society. “The objectives of the scheme are to promote local products and provide an opportunity for youth to earn their livelihood,” he said.
Under this scheme, the Railways provides infrastructure in the form of outlets and stalls to youth for selling food products, he added.
Pawan Sharma, a passenger from Mumbai said the stalls are very useful near the stations. “Sometimes people miss the train when they go outside to buy the food stuff. Now, people can buy food items easily in the premises of the Railway station,” he said.
Talking to KNO, Chief Area Manager (CAM), Northern Railways, Kashmir, Saqib Yousuf said the steps have been taken under Pan India scheme. “The scheme will create employment for people and is meant for easy access to the passengers, who can buy the products inside the railway station now,” he said.
He said though this platform, people can showcases the local products of the region—(KNO)
Srinagar, Jan 21: Jammu and Kashmir’s security grid has been put on a high alert in the wake of upcoming Republic Day and the ensuing Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) while as frisking has been intensified in Srinagar, Jammu, highways, and sensitive areas of the Union Territory (UT).
A senior police official told news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that for the R-Day, security grid has been tightened and forces including police and CRPF have been deployed across the UT and all sorts of arrangements are in place to ensure smooth passage of all official functions of January 26.
“This time around, we have a double challenge—one of R-Day and another of BJY. Extra deployments have been made wherever necessary and all security agencies have been directed to maintain a highest level of alertness to foil the evil designs,” the official said, wishing not to be named.
BJY led by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has already entered Jammu and is scheduled to reach Srinagar on January 30
He said that all vigil is being maintained on the highways, sensitive areas and in all major cities and towns. “In Jammu city, deployment has been made for both R-day and the BJY while similar arrangements have been put in place in Srinagar district,” the officer said.
Eye-witnesses told KNO that in Jammu city, police and paramilitary CRPF men have launched massive frisking operations while a close watch is being maintained on the suspects. In Srinagar, police including the women police and CRPF have started intense frisking operations with commuters travelling on four-wheelers and two-wheelers being frisked thoroughly. “I was travelling from Pantha Chowk to Sonwar and was stopped by CRPF men. I was asked to show the I-D card. The CRPF men also took my photograph and when I asked why he took the snap, he replied that he had to show it to his superior,” said Showkat Ahmed, a resident of Pantha Chowk.
Police sources said that as part of the heightened security grid for peaceful conduct of R-Day and BJY, all the CCTVs have been made functional in Srinagar and in all districts of Kashmir and movement of vehicles, pedestrians is being closely watched from the respective control rooms of police. A police source said that it was likely to go for aerial surveillance through drones in Srinagar and Jammu on January 26 to maintain aerial vigil. “We may use drones a day ahead of R-Day,” he said. “Night patrolling is also being conducted in several areas of Kashmir and Jammu.”
Many other commuters and auto-drivers said that they were stopped at multiple points from Dalgate to Lal Chowk and thoroughly frisked. The main R-Day function will be held at Jammu where LG Manoj Sinha will unfurl the tri-colour. In Srinagar, LG’s advisor, Rajiv Rai Bhatnagar will take the salute of the parade and also hoist the national flag. Pertinently, LG Sinha told reporters at Zewan, Srinagar on January 20, that elaborate security arrangements have been made to facilitate BJY. Earlier, DGP Dilbagh Singh had stated that all security measures were in place for the smooth conduct of all official functions on R-Day eve across the UT—(KNO)
I’m going to disappoint you with my terribly proletarian tastes. If I was to be hanged in the morning, which is quite possible, I would have beans on toast. Because I love that and I have that on a Sunday very regularly because it just makes me happy. I’ve tried to be much more adventurous over the years, but I’m basically working-class, proletarian filth and it’s very hard to eradicate some of those things.
I was a vegetarian for 15 years and I stopped about 2000, a year after The League of Gentlemen was first on TV. Even though things had got so much better for vegetarians, I remember sitting somewhere in Soho and looking at this menu and there were three things I could eat. And I just thought: “Fuck it!” So I had some chicken and it was incredibly bland and I thought: “I’ve blown it, I’ve wasted 15 years of proper abstinence for this bland chicken!” Then the next day I had a bacon sandwich and everything was all right.
I’m a hopeless cook. Terrible. I can make quite a good chilli and I do like doing a lamb tagine with apricots. But I’ve also got a kind of anti-Midas touch: I can take the most exotic ingredients in the world and make them bland.
I’m really genuinely terrified that we are losing for ever the caff. And I mean that very specifically: the caff not the cafe. This is a campaign I would like to get started. I was in town a couple of weeks ago for a meeting, I was a bit early, and I absolutely couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t Pret. I don’t even mean an amazing greasy spoon. I mean literally somewhere that did egg and chips and a cup of tea. They are genuinely vanishing and it’s such a shame because there’s nothing like them.
An army marches on its stomach, and that’s very much true with a film crew. I’ve often seen it, you can get a mutinous film crew because they don’t like the catering. They just start disappearing at lunchtime, and go to the pub and get something there. And if you’ve lost them, there’s something very wrong. Once I was directing something in the middle of a heatwave and I sent someone out to get as many ice lollies as we could find in this scarce environment. Oh my God, what a difference it made to everyone’s mood!
I vividly remember asking for a steak tartare and asking for it to be well done. Because I had no idea; it was just some words I’d heard in a James Bond film or something.
Again, going back to my roots, I’m a very fast eater. And it’s a problem. I have to consciously slow down. I think it’s because we all ate very quickly when I was a kid, because well, my dad would nick it if we didn’t. But it casts an interesting shadow, even when you’re trying to enjoy a meal. I’m in the middle of a conversation, and I look down and I’m nearly finished and everybody else is just talking: “Oh no, I’ve done it again!”
One of the funniest experiences of my life was when my partner and I went to Paris many years ago. We decided to stay at the George V and really push the boat out and, insanely, to eat in the hotel restaurant. The service was suffocatingly good, when there’s like 13 people to show you to your table. And in a very English way, you just start clenching up because it’s not fun. Anyway there was so little food that when we eventually fled – and I think we did flee – we went round the corner straight away and had an omelette because we were hungry! And it was £500 each for this tiny meal. Oof, it was a lesson, a lesson.
My favourite things
Food Italian food, overall, is my favourite. I’m very fond of all kinds of pasta dishes and there’s something about the simplicity of the Mediterranean diet that really ticks all my boxes. Maybe it just goes back to my prole roots.
Drink Sauvignon blanc, chilled. On the right day, I don’t think there’s anything quite like it.
Place to eat Katsuya in Los Angeles. They do a spicy tuna, it’s the most delicious thing. You know that feeling when you have chocolate, and you don’t really want to swallow it, you just want to let it stay in your mouth? It’s like that.
Dish to make I make quite a good chilli, and I enjoy the process of it. Following a recipe is not beyond anyone, but I just never seem to do it. It’s the risk, isn’t it? If the evening meal is depending on you, it’s not the time to take risks.
Mark Gatiss stars as Larry Grayson in Nolly on ITVX in February. He is directing The Unfriend at the Criterion Theatre, London, and from next month The Way Old Friends Do at the Birmingham Rep. He will star as John Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre from April
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
In the summer of 2020, when British society emerged from months of Covid lockdown, the UK housing market reopened and began booming, amid fierce demand for larger homes as buyers sought more space, better home working environments or a garden.
Fuelled by ultra-low interest rates and then-chancellor Rishi Sunak’s stamp duty holiday, the numbers of homeowners moving to new properties began to rise sharply from June 2020, and by August mortgage approvals had jumped to their highest level since October 2007.
In March 2021, the number of completed loans for house purchases formovers was 142% higher than a year earlier, according to UK Finance, and by May the average UK house price had risen 10.2% in 12 months.
Fast forward to today and the situation has changed dramatically: in December the average UK house price fell for the fourth month in a row, with experts expecting a further slowdown in a struggling economy. Bank of England policymakers have raised interest rates nine times in the past year and are forecast to do so again when they next meet. Borrowers re-fixing their mortgages are among those hit hardest in the cost of living crisis.
People at an estate agent’s window in November 2020, near the start of the market’s post-lockdown boom. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Shutterstock
A number of homeowners who moved to a bigger property during the pandemic have spoken to the Observer about how their largerhomes have turned into financial burdens.
Claire and her husband James, who did not want to give their full names, upsized from their three-bedroom mid-terrace former council house in central Hertfordshire to a £600,000 five-bed in a Cambridgeshire town in spring 2021, in the belief that mortgage rates would remain low. “We stretched our budget to move to our dream house. Monthly payments have just increased by £370, after we rushed to re-fix forfive years at just under 4% in November,” Claire says.
The couple, who have two children, have a household income of just over £60,000, and do not qualify for any government help apart from the £400 energy grant. They hope that meticulous budgeting will enable them to keep the house, but worry they may not succeed.
Downsizing right now would, the couple is acutely aware, come with enormous penalties and costs, such as stamp duty, but every time they talk about it “it becomes a bit less of a joke”, says James, a middle manager in a tech company who currently works mostly from home.
He also fears being asked to return full-time to the office. “If I would have to do the 80-minute one-way commute to work in Hertfordshire again, just the fuel costs would blow us financially out of the water.
“When we bought, it was inconceivable to me that interest rates would be going up this much. I’m not sure we’d be able to weather another big financial change. Retrospectively, I feel it was quite irresponsible for the bank to lend us this much, and I know they would have lent us more.”
As chancellor, Rishi Sunak introduced a stamp duty holiday in 2020. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images
After having a second child in 2020 and spending a lot of time together working from home and home schooling during Covid lockdowns, Barbara and her husband, John, decided that their three-bedroom house was becoming “claustrophobic”, and upsized to a period property twice the size in central Plymouth.
“It was a step up the ladder, we weren’t overstretching ourselves with our new mortgage and we had some money put aside to renovate the house,” Barbara says. “Then came the cost of living crisis, higher energy bills and our nursery fees rose to over £900 a month. We cut back on everything, but when Trussonomics tanked the pound, we knew what it meant for our mortgage renewal.
“We came to the awful conclusion that the only way to avoid financially struggling in future was to sell our home before we got into trouble.
“We both have well-paid academic jobs – 10 years ago we had a far more modest income but could still afford to travel, save money, eat out and so on. Our income is higher than ever before but our standard of living has dropped substantially. We watch every penny.”
During the Covid buying frenzy, housing price growth reached its highest rate in more than a decade, while prices of houses grew more quickly than prices of flats across all UK regions. A Bank of England report suggests homebuyers’ preference for houses over flats was associated with about 38% of the housing price increase between 2020 and 2021, and probably the most important factor in the boom.
Halifax now predicts house prices will fall by about 8% this year. The number of inquiries from potential homebuyers fell for a fifth month in a row in September, while sales dropped to the lowest level since May 2020.
Barbara and John put their home on the market last month, and have already had to reduce the price. “We are likely now to make a loss upon sale. We are so angry and upset with the government that we have ended up here.”
For others, upsizing was motivated not primarily by a quest for more space but by the idea that buying a house would be a good investment. Amy, 35, an analyst from London who lives on her own, traded her one-bedroom flat for a £475,000 three-bedroom house in January 2021.
An estate agent’s window in November 2022, by which point house prices were falling steadily. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
Feeling that the high service charges in her previous flat were a waste of money, she made more than 20 offers on houses, but kept getting outbid by £50,000 to £75,000. “I had to go over budget to get this house, by a lot,” Amy says. “But mortgage rates were really good when I bought, I was able to borrow £285,000 at 1.2%.”
When she had to re-fix her mortgage in December last year, however, her monthly payments rose by £397, from £844 to £1,241, thanks to a new rate of 4.74%.
“I’m considering moving to a smaller property somewhere cheaper,” Amy says. “I looked at a couple of flats in Stratford [in east London], but their service charges were even higher than in my previous flat, £5,000 to £6,000 annually.
“I’m also apprehensive, as house prices have not risen as much as they could have. But if I could downsize to a property in a cost-effective way, I’d do that. I’d have to.”
Adam Fahey, an architect and father of four from Surrey, is one of a several homeowners who told the Observer their finances would not stretch far enough to comfortably absorb significantly higher mortgage rates coupled with the higher cost of living. The family is now downsizing to a property worth just over half the value of their current home.
“We have just accepted an offer on our home for £1.4m and had our offer on a new home in West Sussex accepted, for £750,000. The house we’re moving to is much smaller: we’ll have about 650 sq feet less than in our current house, which is a six-bed with four reception rooms.
“We have a £290,000 mortgage we are keen to remove, to reduce financial stress. The only way to do this is to downsize. The school run will take 30 to 40 minutes longer, but the improved standard of living will be worth it. Our mortgage and energy bills will be approximately £2,000 cheaper each month in the new house.
“We are looking forward to meals out and family holidays – our move will allow us to do such things again.”
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#Upsize #downsize #Covid #property #race #space #sour #homebuyers
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
If you’re a woman of a certain age, struggling in the housing crisis, you could always check into Milf Manor. It’s a new US reality show in which women and their sons live in a house together and then all the ladies and all the guys flirt with each other (Milf stands for Mum I’d Love to Fuck, in case you didn’t know). In the search for a new hit, Milf Manor’s producers have gone back to the oldest human drive on the planet, the mother of them all: the original dyad between a baby and their primary caregiver. Maternal love, filial love, carnal love and erotic love blend together in a mutually jealous, weirdly kinky, televised Freudian melange. It’s natural, it’s normal, it’s common, it’s fine! After all, Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex 400 years before the birth of Christ. Once you pass 40, you become invisible to men in their 30s while every 20-year-old on the planet notices you, including waiters, security guards, interns and other women’s sons. I can explain it in one word: perimenopause. When wise Mother Nature realises your ship is sailing, she starts wafting out your erotic pheromones at double strength like novelty cocktails during happy hour at the last-chance saloon and you attract those virile young males who are biologically best able to “pollinate the flower”. Milf Manor is airing on the cable network TLC, which also happens to stand for Tender Loving Care. As the guys queueing to visit Milf Manor know, that’s exactly what you get when you come to Mummy.
Last orders for alcohol?
Is even drink one too many? Photograph: John Angerson/Alamy
Research from Canada indicates that, rather than abstaining from booze only in dry January, we should extend it for ever as there is no really safe alcohol limit. I’ve never been a big drinker because I only do things that benefit my career and being drunk doesn’t. Also, I’m a puker. There’s no happy moment. I’m sober, then I go hot and cold, my vision starts shimmering, my stomach turns over and it all ends in clammy remorse. It’s basic to celebrate boozing as a hobby and philistine to build an entire culture or national identity out of it. No one on the planet is better drunk than sober, alcohol is an unnecessary expense and it’s not good for your complexion. There’s nothing cool about being sloppy or making bad decisions or not being able to remember what you did. Life is enjoyable in itself; good company gives exactly the same buzz that you think a cocktail will.
Get into the groove…
Strike a pose: Madonna Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Looking at the headlines, it may seem as though there’s little to cheer about. Well, the Queen of Pop, Madonna herself, is here to set things right with her greatest hits tour, Celebration. I admire Madonna both as a creative artist and a tough woman in public life. The last really fun thing I did before the pandemic was seeing the first night of her Madame X tour at the London Palladium three years ago. She was so charismatic that she glowed like a laser, her star quality washing over the audience in throbbing waves of white light. In an age when fame lasts barely as long as a TikTok reel, it’s good to honour a four-decade career that combines style and substance in one unique, steely package. To quote from her hit, Vogue, when “everywhere you turn is heartache… I know a place where you can get away. It’s called a dancefloor” and Madonna knows what it’s for.
Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
When Twitter first appeared in July 2006, I was enchanted by it. At one point, some geek created an app that logged tweets and geolocated them in real time on a map of the world, so you could watch little dots popping up all over the globe. (I even made a short video recording of my screen and set it to music, but didn’t put it online because I didn’t own the music rights, and now I can’t find it. Sigh – such is digital life.)
What I loved about Twitter at the beginning was that it enabled you to plug into the thought streams of people you liked or admired. Like all good things, though, that came to an end when the platform embarked on the algorithmic curation of users’ feeds to increase “engagement” (and, it hoped, profits). And from then on, it became increasingly tiresome, though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform – and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.
Like many other people, my gaze alighted on Mastodon as a possible refuge from the Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same kind of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. Mastodon, in contrast, is a protocol – “a system of rules for spinning up your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. So whereas Twitter is a universe, Mastodon is what has come to be called a “fediverse” – that is, a decentralised network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one observer put it: “A distributed network of Twitter-like services.”
That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively straightforward. Joining Twitter involves just signing up on twitter.com; but to become a Mastodon user, you have to sign up to one of those semi-independent nodes. They’re basically just servers run by individuals or groups, and Mastodon helpfully provides a list of ones that you might consider joining. Once in, your identity is linked to the server on which you have an account. So if you’ve chosen the username “vici” on the server arsenalfc.social, then your username will be @vici@arsenalfc.social. And you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter what server they happen to be on.
From then on, it’s a bit like using Twitter – posting rather than tweeting, reposting, liking and so on. The big difference is you only see stuff that those whom you follow have posted: your feed is not algorithmically curated for some venture capitalist’s benefit. (Mastodon is open source and administered by a German-based non-profit company, Mastodon gGmbH.)
If you’re coming from Twitter, the first thing you’ll notice about Mastodon is that it seems quieter, somehow – there’s less shouting, less aggro, less posturing, less humblebragging. And of course it may also seem duller at first, because you’re only seeing what your “followees” (is that a word?) have posted or reposted. You’ll also notice that if one of your contacts wants to post something that they feel might be shocking or disturbing, they have been able to flag it beforehand so you don’t click on it.
So far, so good. But since this is technology, there are downsides. The most obvious one is that while you are no longer at the whimsical mercy of an erratic digital emperor called Elon, the administrator of your chosen Mastodon server may not be an angel (or a Democrat) either – as one blogger discovered. “I believed the Mastodon propaganda,” he wrote, “and picked out a small site from the list at joinmastodon.org. That small site turned out to be run by fascists and does not allow one to cancel one’s account. I left and moved on to a small political site… which kicked my moderate liberal ass out for being too radical. I then decided that being one bird in a large flock was a good idea and signed up for an account at mastodon.social, the Mastodon mother site.”
So is it a substitute for Twitter? I don’t think so, any more than avocados are a substitute for mangoes. Twitter is really for broadcasting – for letting the world at large know what you think, or alerting people to your forthcoming book/event/podcast, or complaining about potholes, Rishi Sunak, Brexit, the metaverse and the general awfulness of everything.
At its best, Mastodon seems to be more about conversation rather than shouting, and in that sense reminds me of the early internet – in the 1980s, before the world wide web – and in particular of Usenet, the network’s first global online discussion space. In which case, wouldn’t it be ironic if the Martian adventurer Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter turned out to be bringing us back to the future?
What I’ve been reading
Freedom of religion Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge is a fascinating editorial in Noema magazine by Nathan Gardels on the late pontiff’s debate with German philosopher Jürgen Habermas about democratic values.
Data protection Some really helpful advice on digital security from US cryptographer and technologist Bruce Schneier, who knows this stuff inside out, can be found in the Choosing Secure Passwords post on his Schneier on Security blog.
Grammar school A Civil War Over Semicolons is an entertaining piece by Gal Beckerman in the Atlantic about the arguments US biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been having for 50 years.
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#future #Mastodon #restoring #lost #art #online #conversation #John #Naughton
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Harlequins secured their place in the Champions Cup knockout stages in considerable style, chalking up a first victory of 2023 and giving a demonstration of what England are set to gain with Nick Evans now turning his attentions to running their attack.
Nick David was the standout performer against the Sharks, scoring the pick of Harlequins’ five tries in a fine showing orchestrated by Evans, who on Sunday joins up with England as attack coach. He will be joined by Marcus Smith, who impressed in his second match since injury to offer a glimpse of how England’s attack may function against Scotland next month.
It was also a demonstration of what Harlequins can do if the rain stays off. Danny Care, making his 350th appearance, got on the scoresheet, as did the England hopefuls Alex Dombrandt and Cadan Murley as well as Stephan Lewies. It was a win Harlequins needed, having not prevailed since Racing 92 were the visitors on 18 December.
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It is no mean feat to progress with 12 points after double headers with the Sharks and Racing and even if Harlequins seem to lack the forward might that tends to be required at the business end of the campaign, they will cause their opponents problems in the last 16 on this evidence. It will help that Evans will be back from his England secondment by then. “We’ve all been really desperate to play in good conditions and score ties and [Nick has] orchestrated a pretty good gameplan that, when it’s executed, looks spectacular, so we wish him well,” said the Harlequins coach, Tabai Matson.
The introduction of the South African sides has not been without its difficulties but the Sharks have been a force to be reckoned with in the pool stages, making this victory for Harlequins all the more impressive. “The mindset triggers your physicality and if you’re not physical and your set piece doesn’t function, you have no chance against these guys,” added Matson. “I’m really pleased with our performance against a team of that quality.”
Danny Care scores a try for Harlequins on his 350th appearance. Photograph: Ben Whitley/PA
Harlequins’ quest got off to a bad start when Lukhanyo Am finished off the kind of stylish try that suggested it could be a long afternoon for the home side. Aphelele Fassi’s kick down the left touchline was gathered by Thaakir Abrahams, who fed the ball inside to Am for a clear run to the line.
It only served to kick Harlequins into gear, with three swashbuckling tries in the ensuing 20 minutes. Care had the first after Harlequins had gone through multiple phases with the Sharks’ defence floundering. The second was a beauty with Smith fizzing a pass to Joe Marchant, whose offload to David sliced open the Sharks’ defensive line. Dombrandt was running a trademark supporting line to go over. The third was a flowing move from left to right with Harlequins finding it all too easy to create the overlap. Murley finished off with David again the provider.
Curwin Bosch had added a penalty for the Sharks early, and to the visitors’ credit they stuck in the contest with Jaden Hendrikse scoring a try in the right-hand corner that owed much to perseverance after a powerful run from Marnus Potgieter. A Smith penalty extended Harlequins’ lead to nine but then Eben Etzebeth scored a bizarre try to keep his side within touching distance. The Springboks lock stole in to seize the loose ball from under Care’s nose at the bottom of a ruck and scamper clear. Care was incensed, convinced that Etzebeth had no right to go for the ball, but replays appeared to show that Joe Marler’s bind as part of the caterpillar ruck had been broken and the South African was therefore legal.
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Courtney Lawes limped off in the 29th minute of Northampton’s 31-13 defeat to La Rochelle in the Champions Cup to put in doubt his participation in this season’s Six Nations. Lawes has been beset with injuries of late and if he is ruled out it will be a serious blow to England’s chances of a successful campaign.
Phil Dowson, Northampton’s head coach, said: “Courtney doesn’t appear to be downbeat, he never is, but he felt he couldn’t continue. His calf tightened up, he hasn’t had an issue with it before but he will need to see the physio tomorrow and possibly have a scan so it’s fingers crossed.”
The loss of Lawes completed a miserable afternoon for Saints, as the centre Fraser Dingwall was sent off for a high challenge just 10 minutes after Lawes had left the field and the lock Lukhan Salakaia-Loto also received a red card in the dying moments.
The replacement hooker Quentin Lespiaucq-Brettes scored two tries for La Rochelle, Levani Botia, Ulupano Seuteni and Grégory Alldritt the others, with Antoine Hastoy kicking three conversions. Tom James scored a try for Northampton, with Fin Smith adding two penalties and a conversion.
Leinster advanced to the last 16 as top seeds with a runaway 36-10 win over Racing 92 at the Aviva Stadium. The Irish province’s unbeaten record looked under threat until they cut loose with unanswered tries from Hugo Keenan (52nd and 69th minute), Josh van der Flier (65th), Jimmy O’Brien (73rd) and Garry Ringrose (80th+3).
Two tries from George McGuigan proved vital as Gloucester moved into the knockout stages with a sensational 26-17 victory at Bordeaux-Bègles. The hooker, who has been named in England’s Six Nations squad, crossed twice from driving lineouts as Gloucester completed the double over the French side to be the final qualifier from Pool A in the last 16. PA Media
Harlequins reestablished some breathing space when Lewies splashed over in the corner from the back of a driving maul before David produced the score of the match with a fine finish from inside his own half. The Sharks were threatening at that point but Abrahams’ kick was straight into David’s arms. Spotting space in behind, he collected his grubber kick and raced clear to put Harlequins in command.
Led by the tireless Siya Kolisi the Sharks kept toiling but Smith’s penalty kept the home side comfortably ahead despite Fassi’s late score, which did, at least, ensure a losing bonus point for the Sharks, who were chasing a home tie in the next round.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir Disaster Management Authority has issued an avalanche warning for at least nine districts for next 24 hours.
Jammu and Kashmir Disaster Management Authority (JKDMA) in a statement said that an avalanche with low danger level is likely to occur above 2500 metres over Anantnag, Bandipore, Baramula, Doda, Kishtwar, Kulgam, Kupwara, Poonch, Ramban in next 24 hours.
General public is advised to have valley movement with care. Avoid movement on slopes, JKDMA said in a statement.
The third feature from Copenhagen-based Iranian director Ali Abbasi shares with his breakthrough film, the troll-thriller Border, a fascination with the monsters that lurk on the fringes of society. But in this Persian-language picture, based on a real-life serial killer who murdered 16 sex workers in the Iranian city of Mashhad, the monster is not just a single individual, but a wider culture of misogyny.
It’s a timely release, adding to the spotlight on women’s rights and roles in Iranian society, and driven by two impressive performances – from theatre actor Mehdi Bajestani as the murderer, and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, playing Rahimi, the female investigative journalist reporting on the case. It’s a tense, atmospheric piece of film-making but it made me profoundly uncomfortable – and not, I should add, in a good way. There’s a prurience in how the murders are filmed – the camera hungrily scouring the distorted faces of dying women – that borders on dehumanising. This, combined with the fact that it’s the female journalist, rather than any of the victims, whose character is developed, unintentionally supports the idea that some women’s lives are worth more than others.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
