In Brief – June 2019
Grammy and Oscar-winning musician A R Rahman breaks his Ramadan fast and has Iftar dinner at Cannes. The music maestro was at the film festival to promote his directorial debut Le Musk, India’s first virtual reality film. He took to Instagram, where he posted a photograph of himself holding a glass of apple juice.
A new species of snake has been found in Arunachal Pradesh’s West Kameng district. The reddish-brown pit viper , a venomous snake with a unique heat sensing system. was found by a team of herpetologists led by Ashok Captain. Comparative analyses of DNA sequences and examination of morphological features suggested that the snake belonged to an earlier unknown species.
Former India cricketer G S Lakshmi became the first female match referee to be inducted into the International Cricket Council (ICC)’s International Panel of Match Referees. Lakshmi, 51, officiated her first match in women’s domestic cricket in 2008, and has supervised three women’s One Day Internationals, and three T20 Internationals. Subsequently, following Australian Claire Polosak, who became the first female umpire to officiate a men’s ODI on April 27 between Oman and Namibia, Lakshmi will become eligible to referee international matches with immediate effect.
Sherpa climber Kami Rita scaled Mount Everest for the 24th time, breaking his own record for the most successful ascents of the world’s highest peak. Rita, 50, first scaled Everest in 1994 and has been making the trip nearly every year since.
The Heritage Jail Museum administered by the Telangana State Prisons Department runs a unique jail tourism called ‘Feel the Jail’ where anyone can spend 24 hours inside the Sangareddy prison for a fee. Recently a dentist and a restaurateur flew all the way from Kuala Lumpur to Hyderabad to get jailed in this 220-year-old prison.
Compiled by Kiran Zehra
