Power shutdown

11/01/2020

There will be a power shutdown from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tuesday due to maintenance works at Vadipatti, Alanganallur and Ayyankottai substations: Rajakkalpatti, Maravarpatti, Chathiravellapatti, Valayapatti, Errampatti, Palamedu, Manickampatti, Senthamangalam, Pondhugampatti, Alanganallur, Kuravankulam, Siruvalai, Ambalathadi, Alagapuri, A. Puthupatti, Vaikasipatti, Muduvarpatti, Aathanur, Achampatti, Vairavanatham, Nagari, Kattakulam, Kutladampatti, Mettuneerathan, Semminipatti, Ramanayakkanpatti, T.Mettupatti, Ramagoundanpatti, Vadugapatti, C. Pudur, Thanichiyam, Melachinnanampatti, Alankottaram, Thirumalnatham, Rishabam and Nedungulam.

Teacher gets five years’ jail for humiliating Dalit student

Punished for making child clean human waste in 2015

11/01/2020, STAFF REPORTER,NAMAKKAL

A government schoolteacher who made a class II student clean human waste manually was on Friday sentenced to undergo five years’ imprisonment under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, by a special court in Namakkal.

The judge also imposed a penalty of ₹1,000 on her.

According to the prosecution, in 2015, when R. Vijayalakshmi was working as a teacher at the Government Middle School in Ramapuram, near Namakkal, she asked a Dalit student to manually clean the waste of a classmate. The boy did as the teacher told him to and later informed his parents. Following this, protests were held outside the school demanding action against the teacher.

The boy’s parents also filed a complaint at the Namakkal police station and a case was registered against the teacher under provisions of the Act. She was suspended from the school thereafter. The case was investigated by T. Manoharan, Namakkal DSP, and a chargesheet filed before the Special Court for trial of cases registered under the SC/ST Act. After hearing the arguments by public prosecutor Madheshwaran and the defence counsel, sessions judge K. Dhanasekaran sentenced the teacher to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of ₹1,000 under Section 3(1)(x) of the SC/ST Act.

“The teacher has asked a student from the Scheduled Caste community to clean human waste of another student manually. The court has awarded the highest punishment to the accused under the Act,” said Mr. Madheshwaran.

The accused would have to serve a further six months of prison time if she failed to pay the fine.

Nirbhaya case: plea calls for organ donation

11/01/2020, PRESS TRUST OF INDIA,NEW DELHI

A Delhi court on Friday dismissed a plea by an NGO, RACO, requesting a meeting with the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, to persuade them to donate their organs.

Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora dismissed the plea on the grounds of “being devoid of any merit” and the the applicants having no locus to meet the convicts. The court also noted: “As per record available, two of the four accused have moved petitions before SC.”

Girl plays truant to keep High Court date

She complained about lack of infrastructural facilities at her school in Ponneri

11/01/2020, MOHAMED IMRANULLAH S.,CHENNAI

R.B. Adhigai Mutharasi with her lawyer father A.E. Baskaran on Friday.

Six-year-old R.B. Adhigai Mutharasi, a Class II student, played truant from school on Friday to visit a most bizarre place for kids — the Madras High Court.

The girl walked into the court buildings right royally, and not even the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), guarding the court campus, could prevent her entry, as she was a litigant, and thereby rightfully entitled to follow the proceedings in her case.

What’s more is that the girl had filed the case against the headmistress of her own school — the Minjur Panchayat Union Primary School in Ponneri Taluk of Tiruvallur district — complaining about the lack of infrastructural facilities.

The girl sought for a direction to carry out all repair works in the school buildings, evict encroachments on the school property and keep the institution neat and clean at all times.

On finding the girl wait for long in the litigants’ gallery, along with her lawyer father, Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and R. Hemalatha called her to the dais and had an interesting chat. After asking her name and other details, when the judges wanted to know why she hadn’t gone to school, the uninhibited child did not hesitate to tell the judges that she had bunked her classes to come to court.

Amused by her answer and appreciative of her confidence, the senior judge in the Bench told the little litigant that it was wrong to avoid going to school.

“How will you study well if you don’t go to school regularly. You should not avoid school like this,” the judges told the girl, before she ran back to her father and asked: “Appa (father), is the case over, can we go home now?”

In response to her writ petition, School Education Department officials filed a status report, along with certain photographs, to claim that most of the concerns raised by her had been addressed, and the school was being maintained well. However, the girl’s counsel contested the claim, and contended that the school continued to be in a bad shape, despite having been an institution established way back in 1964.

After advising the officials to take sincere action to rectify the defects pointed out by the petitioner, and not to turn egoistic just because a lawyer had filed the case in the name of his daughter, the judges said if funds were a reason for poor maintenance, then it could be arranged through CSR activities.

After asking the petitioner’s counsel to peruse the status report fully, the judges adjourned the case. “So, should I come back again,” Mutharasi asked her father A.E. Baskaran, who smiled and reminded her of the judge’s advice.

Link buses to operate for Pongal

11/01/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT ,CHENNAI

The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) will be operating special link buses from various parts of the city for facilitating access for commuters to the six bus termini.

The State Transport Department will operate over 16,000 buses for Pongal, from six locations. MTC will be operating link buses round-the-clock.

In a press release, the MTC said 310 special link buses would be operated for three days, from January 12 to 14.

After over a year, AC buses to ply again

MTC purchases 48 buses at ₹36 lakh apiece; minimum ticket price fixed at ₹15

11/01/2020, R. SRIKANTH,CHENNAI

Travelling in style: Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami inspecting an air-conditioned bus.Special Arrangement

The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) has reintroduced air-conditioned buses in the city, after a gap of nearly one-and-a-half years.

The AC buses have been launched on two routes — Dr. MGR Bus Terminus in Koyambedu to Siruseri via Velachery (Bus no. 570) and Thiruvanmiyur to Tambaram (Bus no. 91), a senior MTC official said.

The MTC has purchased 48 AC buses from Ashok Leyland at a cost of ₹36 lakh each, and plans to operate them on five more routes. The routes are: Central Railway Station to Thiruvanmiyur (A1), T. Nagar to Kelambakkam (19B), Koyambedu to Vandalur (70V), East Tambaram to Thiruvanmiyur (95) and Broadway to Kelambakkam (102). The AC buses were introduced after they were showcased to Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami on Thursday.

The minimum ticket price has been fixed at ₹15 and maximum is ₹60 till Siruseri, MTC officials said. The Volvo AC buses, operated earlier, were stopped around July 2018. The minimum price of a ticket then was ₹28.

97.5°F, not 98.6°F, likely new normal body temp

Since 1851, Average Human Body Temperature Has Decreased By 0.05°F Per Birth Decade

Nicholas Bakalar 11.01.2020

We seem to be getting cooler. Since 1851, when the standard was set at 37°centigrade (or celsius), or 98.6°Fahrenheit, the average human body temperature has steadily declined. Researchers studied three databases: 23,710 readings obtained between 1862 and 1930 in veterans of the Civil War; 15,301 records in a national health survey from 1971 to 1975; and 150,280 entries in a Stanford University database from 2007 to 2017. The analysis is in eLife.

The researchers observed that the body temperature of men born in the 2000s is on average 1.06°F lower than that of men born in the early 1800s.

Similarly, researchers observed that the body temperature of women born in the 2000s is on average 0.58°F lower than that of women born in the 1890s. Overall, the average body temperature decreased by 0.03°C, or about 0.05°F, per birth decade.

Differences in measurement techniques and equipment do not explain the effect. The decline was evident even within each database, year by year, and the drop between the two modern databases, when equipment and techniques were presumably the same, was identical.

Why this is happening is unclear, but scientists suggest that improvements in sanitation and improved dental and medical care have reduced chronic inflammation, and the constant temperatures maintained by modern heating and air conditioning have helped lower the resting metabolic rates. Today, a temperature of 97.5°F may be closer to “normal” than the traditional 98.6°F.

“Physiologically, we’re just different from what we were in the past. The environment that we are living in has changed, including the temperature in our homes, our contact with microorganisms and the food that we have access to. All these things mean that although we think of human beings as if we are monomorphic and have been the same for all of human evolution, we are not the same,” said the senior author, Dr Julie Parsonnet, a professor of medicine at Stanford.

“We have looked at the US,” said Parsonnet, “and we have to see if this holds true elsewhere. We are evolving physiologically. But what does it really mean? I don’t know. I haven’t figured out exactly how to look at that.”

With input from agencies

WE’RE STEADILY GETTING COOLER