We continue to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting mobile apps; that big app crash caused by Facebook; new app releases from Facebook and Google; and Apple's plans to move WWDC online.

We continue to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting mobile apps; that big app crash caused by Facebook; new app releases from Facebook and Google; and Apple's plans to move WWDC online.

The annual list of awards for celebrities and community heroes - due to be released in June - has fallen victim to Whitehall 'bandwidth' issues as officials are swamped by virus battle.

Cecile Rol Tanguy (pictured) died yesterday at her home in Monteaux, central France, as Europe commemorated the 75th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to Allied forces.

The annual list of awards for celebrities and community heroes - due to be released in June - has fallen victim to Whitehall 'bandwidth' issues as officials are swamped by virus battle.

2. Relevant facts are that plaintiff has filed suit for recovery against the defendant no.1 and 2. The case of the plaintiff, as set out in the plaint, is that plaintiff is a company registered under the Companies Act 1956 and is engaged in the manufacturing of coating powder and trading of decorative and industrial paints and thinner since 1994. The defendant is a limited company and registered under the Companies Act, 1956 and involved in the manufacturing of electrical panels. The defendant through its directors/ officials approached the plaintiff for purchase of the coating powder and industrial paints and thinner and at the time of commencement of the business, the terms of business, as specifically printed on or contained in the plaintiff's invoices were agreed by the defendant and thereafter business dealings and transactions started between the parites hereto in 2004 and since 15.04.2004 they have been maintaining a running account.

Some of the hits of the last few years (post-liberalisation) show a decided nostalgia for a traditional way of life where women are the homemakers, says Shahla Raza.

Women like Mukta Jodia, the first recipient of the Chingari Award for Women Against Corporate Crime, are a reminder of the other India, the real India. What triggers their struggles is quite often the lack of transparency, writes Kalpana Sharma.

Despite claims of strict safety measures taken post November 2nd Wagah , Pakistan, suicide bomb blast, the security officials here recovered 7.480 kilogram heroin from goods train that arrived from Pakistan on Wednesday.

Videocon Mobiles has launched its latest 4G smartphone, Cube 3 (V50JL) in India. Priced at Rs 8,490, the smartphone will available across all retail stores.

Although a significant increase, Android Marshmallow still lies below Android Lollipop, and Kitkat on the list. As per the latest distribution numbers, Android Lollipop 5.0 and v5.1 together run on 35% Android devices, followed by Android Kitkat 4.4 with a 27.7% share.

Thyroid cancer is the cancer of the thyroid gland which is found at the neck's front just below Adam's apple. The thyroid gland is a butterfly-shaped gland with two lobes, one at each side joined by a narrow tissue called the

X-ray absorption linear dichroism of rutile TiO2 at the Ti K-edge provides information about the electronic states involved in the pre-edge transitions. Here, linear dichroism with high energy resolution is analyzed in combination with ab initio finite difference method calculations and spherical tensor analysis. It provides an assignment of the three pre-edge peaks beyond the octahedral crystal field splitting approximation and estimates the spatial extension of the corresponding final states. It is then discussed for the first time the X-ray absorption (XAS) of pentacoordinated titanium atoms due to oxygen vacancies and it is found that, similarly to anatase TiO2, rutile is expected to exhibit a transition on the low-energy side of peak A3. Its apparent absence in the experiment is related to the degree of p–d orbital mixing which is small in rutile due to its centrosymmetric point group. A recent XAS linear dichroism study on anatase TiO2 single crystals has shown that peak A2 has an intrinsic origin and is due to a quadrupolar transition to the 3d energy levels. In rutile, due to its centrosymmetric point group, the corresponding peak A2 has a small dipole moment explaining the weak transition. The results are confronted with recent picosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy on rutile TiO2 nanoparticles.

This innovative facility will be at the front line of Earth defense by searching for "killer" asteroids and comets. It will map large portions of the sky nightly, making it an efficient sleuth for not just asteroids but also supernovae and other variable objects.

The post Super sensitive telescope will detect “killer” asteroids and comets on collision course with Earth appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope has discovered an asteroid about 150 feet in diameter that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October.

The post Rapid Response telescope system spots first potentially hazardous asteroid appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

If intelligent and more advanced civilizations exist on other planets then its a good bet that some of these civilizations turned to asteroid mining long ago. If so, the hallmarks of their mining activities, such as unusual dirty halos of cast-off dust and debris around large asteroids, might be detectable from earth.

The post Evidence of asteroid mining in our galaxy may lead to the discovery of extraterrestrial civilizations appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought.

The post Infrared survey reveals fewer near-Earth asteroids than previously thought appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

A new study provides a possible explanation for the mysterious flares. The suggestion is that there is a cloud around Sgr A* containing hundreds of trillions of asteroids and comets, which have been stripped from their parent stars.

The post X-ray flares observed by Chandra are asteroids being torn to pieces in a black hole appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Our solar system seems like a neat and orderly place, with small, rocky worlds near the Sun and big, gaseous worlds farther out, all eight […]

The post Asteroid diversity = “snow globe” Solar System appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

An 880-pound asteroid moving at 38,000 miles per hour hit the moon last September with a blast equivalent to 15 tons of TNT. While errant […]

The post Give us the telescopes and we’ll find the asteroid mines! appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Hundreds of thousands of asteroids are known to orbit our Sun at distances ranging from near the Earth to beyond Saturn. The most widely known […]

The post Asteroids: Breaking up is Hard to Do appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

At 7:05 pm (EDT), Thursday, Sept. 8, NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. Among that spacecraft’s five instruments is […]

The post Asteroid Mission carries Student X-ray Experiment appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Part 1 – Public Programs Coordinator Gloria Kenyon demonstrates crafting for the next Handi Hour program at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art […]

The post Handi-hour crafting – Cross Stitch Embroidery appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

On May 4, 2018, members of the DC R2D2 Builders Club visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History with their droids. Along with thousands […]

The post Droids visit Smithsonian appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

To catch lizards on the offshore islands close to St. Croix in the Caribbean, Smithsonian herpetologist Nicole Angeli uses a lasso of thread looped at […]

The post Mongooses wiped them out. Now Nicole Angeli wants the St. Croix ground lizard home again appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Students walk outside Detroit's Pershing High School in 2017. A lawsuit claims the state of Michigan failed to provide the city's students with the most fundamental of skills: the ability to read.; Credit: Carlos Osorio/AP

In a landmark decision, a federal appeals court has ruled that children have a constitutional right to literacy, dealing a remarkable victory to students.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by students of five Detroit schools, claiming that because of deteriorating buildings, teacher shortages and inadequate textbooks, the state of Michigan failed to provide them with the most fundamental of skills: the ability to read.

For decades, civil rights lawyers have tried to help students and families in underfunded schools by arguing that the U.S. Constitution guarantees children at least a basic education. Federal courts have consistently disagreed. Until now.

The ability to read and write is "essential" for a citizen to participate in American democracy, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday. One cannot effectively vote, answer a jury summons, pay taxes or even read a road sign if illiterate, wrote Judge Eric Clay, and so where "a group of children is relegated to a school system that does not provide even a plausible chance to attain literacy, we hold that the Constitution provides them with a remedy."

"Like a daycare"

The 2016 complaint alleges that Michigan's then-Gov. Rick Snyder and the state's board of education denied Detroit students their fundamental right to literacy. It cites textbooks that were tattered, outdated and in such short supply that teachers could not send work home. The suit also describes school buildings that were in shocking disrepair: broken toilets and water fountains, leaking ceilings, shattered windows.

In warmer months, the complaint says, a lack of air-conditioning caused some students to faint; in winter, students regularly wore hats, coats and scarves to class. Students became accustomed to seeing cockroaches, mice or rats scurrying across the floor.

"You're sitting down in the classroom, and you see rodents in a corner. Or you can hear things crawling in the books," says Jamarria Hall, a plaintiff in the class-action suit, who graduated in 2017. "But the saddest thing of all was really the resources that they had, like, being in a class where there's 34 students, but there's only six textbooks."

Given these conditions, the five K-12 schools named in the complaint also struggled to retain teachers. Many classes were taught by paraprofessionals or inexperienced teachers placed through the Teach For America program. Often, Hall says, when teachers quit suddenly or didn't show up, students would simply be sent to the gym.

"For days on end — weeks on end — if the school didn't have a substitute or couldn't fill that gap, the gym was basically the go-to place. Or they would set students down in the classroom and really put on a movie, like Frozen... like a daycare," Hall remembers.

At one school, the complaint says, a math teacher quit soon after the school year began "due to frustration with large class sizes and lack of support. ... Eventually, the highest performing eighth grade student was asked to take over teaching both seventh and eighth grade math. This student taught both math classes for a month."

The complaint delivers a crushing assessment of these schools' failure to educate students: Proficiency rates "hover near zero in nearly all subject areas," it says.

"Illiteracy is the norm."

Previous legal efforts to argue that families in low-income, underfunded schools deserve better have run headlong into the U.S. Constitution, which makes no mention of the word "education," let alone a right to it.

One of the most famous cases, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before the justices, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that families in poorer districts have no federal right to the same levels of funding as wealthier districts. They essentially said: The system isn't fair, but the U.S. government has no obligation to make it so.

In fact, the first judge to hear the current, Detroit case came to much the same conclusion.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Murphy dismissed the Michigan suit in 2018, writing that, yes, "literacy — and the opportunity to obtain it — is of incalculable importance," but not necessarily a fundamental right.

The students' lawyers disputed Murphy's reasoning and appealed his ruling, and, on Thursday, two of three judges took their side.

"We're not asking for a Cadillac"

In the past, many of the arguments used to pursue educational equity in the courts have been inherently comparative. Using the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, lawyers have focused on disparity — how one school or one district's resources compare to another's.

"This [case] is different," says Tacy Flint, a partner at Sidley Austin LLP and a lawyer for the plaintiffs. "It's not comparative. It's not a question of some people being treated worse than others. This fundamental right to a basic minimum education is a right that every child has."

Flint and her co-counsel focused more on a different pillar of the 14th Amendment, the Due Process Clause, saying the Constitution protects essential rights that "you can't imagine our constitutional democracy or our political life functioning without." And, Flint says, "access to literacy clearly fits that description."

Put simply: The plaintiffs' lawyers did not set out to level the playing field for all students. Instead, they attempted to use the appalling conditions of five Detroit schools to establish a floor.

"This case focuses squarely on literacy as the irreducible minimum," says Kristine Bowman, professor of law and education policy at Michigan State University.

And that minimum is pretty minimal.

"We're not asking for a Cadillac, or even a used, low-end Kia. We're asking for something more than the Flintstones' car," says co-counsel Evan Caminker, a former dean of the University of Michigan Law School.

In his dissent to Thursday's decision, Circuit Judge Eric Murphy argued that accepting literacy as a constitutional right would open a Pandora's box for states, and force federal courts to wrestle with questions beyond their purview: "May they compel states to raise their taxes to generate the needed [school] funds? Or order states to give parents vouchers so that they may choose different schools? How old may textbooks be before they become constitutionally outdated? What minimum amount of training must teachers receive? Which HVAC systems must public schools use?"

Murphy wrote that history, and legal precedent, are on his side: "The Supreme Court has refused to treat education as a fundamental right every time a party has asked it to do so."

After all, the judge reasoned, food, housing and medical care are also "critical for human flourishing and for the exercise of constitutional rights," but the Constitution "does not compel states to spend funds on these necessities of life." Why should education be any different?

A spokesperson for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says her office is reviewing the court's decision before it decides what to do next. Whitmer's office also said in a statement that "the governor has a strong record on education and has always believed we have a responsibility to teach every child to read."

While the ruling is historic, it comes with several caveats. Basic literacy is a remarkably low standard to set for schools. As such, legal experts say, this ruling won't have an immediate impact on children in underfunded schools.

"We're not talking about the court having to recognize a broad-based, free-floating, generalized right to education," says Michelle Adams, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City. This will not "open the floodgates of litigation. We're talking about a situation where students are being warehoused and required to be in school and yet they literally cannot read."

The case is also relatively young. The court's decision could be reviewed by the full 6th Circuit, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, or returned to play out in District Court. Whitmer's office has not yet indicated how the state will respond.

"The fight is not done yet," says Jamarria Hall, who is now living in Tallahassee, Fla., and taking classes at a community college. "We were fighting just to get into the ring. Now we're in the ring. Now the fight really starts."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

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