3 minute read
CHILL OUT
CODA Wins At The Oscars
Director Sian Heder’s film CODA has won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 94th American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Also nominated for the top prize were Belfast, Don’t Look Up, Dune, King Richard, Licorice, Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story and Drive My Car, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The winning film, whose title CODA stands for ‘Child Of Deaf Adults’, is about a girl Ruby, the daughter of deaf-mute parents, who is trying to help the family with business and music.
500 Million-year-old Fossils Found In China
The ancestors of many animals alive today may have lived in modern China more than 500 million years ago, a new study has found. One of the oldest groups of animal fossils currently known to science have been found in Yunnan, southwest China, including the remains of more than 250 species. It is a key record of the Cambrian Explosion, which saw the rapid spread of bilaterian species — creatures that, like modern animals and humans, had symmetry as an embryo, i.e. having a left and a right side that are mirror images of each other.
John Cox Wins The Serbian PEN Centre Award
John Cox, a translator and university professor from Fargo in North Dakota, is the winner of the Serbian PEN Centre Award for the best translator of Serbian literature in 2021. “John Cox has been singled out among other translators for his dedicated and persistent work over the last 15 years translating the works of contemporary Serbian writers of several generations”, says the Board of Directors of the PEN Centre. Cox works with literary translation and has so far translated works by Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović, Branko Ćopić, Danilo Kiš, Biljana Jovanović, Judita Šalgo, Goran Petrović, and a number of other authors into English.
Elon Musk said he is giving “serious thought” to building a new social media platform in a Tweet. He did not share any specifics on what the hypothetical social media platform would look like or how it would work. The Tesla and SpaceX billionaire made the remark after claiming that Twitter doesn’t allow for free speech. Musk tweeted: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?” He followed up by asking whether a new platform is needed.
An incredible new megayacht could become the widest in the world. The £418million (€500million/$551million) Sovrano is described as a hybrid between a private yacht and a cruise ship. The vessel, by Italian design studio Lazzarini, features platforms on either side of the main deck that results in a beam - the width at its widest point - of 108ft (33m). It has a length of 555ft (169m).
Russia Bans Facebook And Instagram
A Russian court has ordered the company Meta to immediately halt the activities of Facebook and Instagram in Russia on the basis of ‘extremist activities’. The court’s decision takes immediate effect, and will not apply to the WhatsApp messaging service. Judge Ogla Solopova made the decision at the request of the Russian prosecutor’s office, reports TASS. Earlier, a number of Western media companies had cut off access to Russia’s state-run media.
