The World News .Live

03/10/2021

With every game, KKR is hurtling from strength to strength. After unearthing a new batting hero in Venkatesh Iyer, they stumbled on a missing block in their playoff pursuit, Shakib Al Hasan, who with Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarty restricted SRH to 115. Contrarily, with every outing, SRH’s vulnerabilities are exposed one after the other.

6⃣th win of the season !

A comfortable victory for & Co. as they beat by 6⃣ wickets

Scorecard https://t.co/Z5rRXTNps5 pic.twitter.com/lQINO8DijE

— IndianPremierLeague () October 3, 2021

Gill’s will

It would be an innings Shubman Gill would keep close to his heart not only for his eye-lighting stroke-play but also for the resolve he showed in negotiating a tricky middle phase of the innings. He set off smoothly, crunching Jason Holder down the ground before fleecing Umran Malik through point, but lost the impetus midway through the knock. After racing to 23 off 20 balls, he eked out only three runs in the next 10.

2⃣ wickets in quick succession!

A wicket each for & Tim Southee. lose Jason Holder & Abdul Samad.

Follow the match https://t.co/Z5rRXTNps5 pic.twitter.com/oGqZSujzLo

— IndianPremierLeague () October 3, 2021

In the past, he would have panicked and done something silly. But here, he rode the storm without any fuss, seeing out Rashid Khan and an inspired Siddharth Kaul, before he latched onto Jason Holder and Malik, smacking them for a brace of boundaries each. The twitchy equation, 65 off 54 balls, dropped to a manageable 44 from 42 balls. The strokes he unfurled were instructive of his cricketing acumen. He didn’t look to manufacture a stroke or resort to non-percentage ones. But just waited for the bowlers to err on the shorter or fuller side, and when they did, he turned the heat on.

His exit —after 57 off 51 balls— did induce momentary panic, more so after Nitish Rana followed him after a laboured 25 off 33 balls. But the serene Dinesh Karthik soaked the pressure and wrapped up the match with a four through deep mid-wicket, with just three balls of the last over remaining.

Match No.2⃣ of the night had a dominance on display

Clinical with the ball and spectacular with the bat

Crucial 2⃣ points with one more game to go | pic.twitter.com/zOublCDjfR

— IndianPremierLeague () October 3, 2021

Spinners skill

In Sunil Narine, Varun Chakravarthy and Shakib Al Hasan, Kolkata Knight Riders have the most distinctive, as well as frightening, spin triumvirate in the league. The th*****me wound up the dazed Sunrisers Hyderabad in a messy tangle of knots — their 12 overs combined cost just 58 runs, a bulk of those from the frenetic six-hitting of Abdul Samad, traded three wickets and piled on 45 dot balls (of 72 balls!).

L. B. W!

First-wicket strike for , courtesy Tim Southee.

Follow the match https://t.co/Z5rRXTNps5 pic.twitter.com/L2fFbhwBfr

— IndianPremierLeague () October 3, 2021

Two of them come with the label mystery spinners, though in this day and age, no mystery seems mysterious enough. Everybody knows what they bowl and how they bowl, yet everybody seems confounded when countering them and therein lies perhaps their mystery. Chakravarty, perceptibly, is the most expansive of the lot, his repertoire boasting all the new-age weaponry of T20 cricket —from the carrom ball to googly, from off-break to leg-breaks. Just watch him on a loop and you understand how cricket has changed. Of course, he is no magician to bowl all these balls without a discernible change in his action, angle of delivery and release point.

Yet, this IPL he has been near decipherable, treated with wide-eyed curiosity and respect. Even Kane Williamson played him with respect — a nervy run of three balls. Later, he had Jason Holder caught in the deep, though Samad blasted three sixes to spoil his figures (yet, reads an impressive 4-0-26-1).

Who will be the 4th team to join , & in the Playoffs

A look at the Points Table after Match 49 pic.twitter.com/5fvk7iH8IG

— IndianPremierLeague () October 3, 2021

Once upon a time, Narine too indulged in variations. These days, he keeps himself to off-spinners, some that slide into the right-handers and some over-spun so that it would bounce awkwardly and the one that slithers away. Besides that, it’s all about the change of pace and trajectory. The flatter path strips batsmen of time to step down and heave him over his head. The change of pace keeps them from premeditating, especially the sweep and the reverse-sweep. In the UAE leg, he has conceded just 6.04 runs an over while nabbing seven wickets in six games. SRH didn’t give him a wicket, but in the bargain, had to settle for 12 runs in his four overs.

The third member of the group, the rarely-used Shakib, is a more conventional bowler, a left-arm orthodox bowler, sharp and subtle to prosper in all three formats. In T20s, he hardly ever flights the ball or turns the ball away from the right-hander. He mostly peddles the low-flung, more round-arm arm-ball and the brisker, fuller-length balls. Like, Narine, it’s difficult to get under him and hit over the top and didn’t leak a single boundary. Not to forget his effervescent fielding — SRH’s backbreaking wicket of Williamson with a direct-hit—and his understated batting.

Source link

The post Kolkata’s Knights at the end of the tunnel after defeating SRH by 6 wickets appeared first on The World News.

03/10/2021

We thought the carnage was over for popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, but as it turns out, millions more than we thought are at risk. About $162 million is up for grabs after an upgrade gone very wrong, according to Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs.

The price of Compound’s native token, called comp, is down about 4.8%.

At first, the Compound chief tweeted Friday that there was a cap to how many comp tokens could be accidentally distributed, noting that “the impact is bounded, at worst, 280,000 comp tokens,” or about $92.6 million.

But on Sunday morning, Leshner revealed that the pool of cash that had already been emptied once had been replenished – exposing another 202,472.5 comp tokens to exploit, or roughly $66.9 million at its current price.

Some, including a core developer at DeFi platform Yearn, are billing this as the biggest-ever fund loss in a smart contract incident, but investors, for their part, don’t seem to care all that much.

“The crypto market shrugged off the largest-ever fund loss as if it was nothing,” said Mudit Gupta, a core developer at decentralized crypto exchange SushiSwap. “The future for DeFi is bright but we’re in uncharted territory, and there’s a lot to be learned still.”

What keeps going wrong

DeFi protocols such as Compound are designed to recreate traditional financial systems such as banks and exchanges using blockchains enriched with self-executing smart contracts.

On Wednesday, Compound rolled out what should have been a pretty standard upgrade. Soon after implementation, however, it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong, once users started to receive millions of dollars in comp tokens.

For example, $30 million worth of comp tokens were claimed in one transaction.

The saving grace of the entire debacle, however, was the fact that the pool of cash that was open to exploit – something called the Comptroller contract – had a finite amount of tokens. The problem is that this leaky pool got a fresh influx of cash, and 0.5 comp tokens are being added roughly every 15 seconds, according to Gupta.

“When the drip() function was called this morning, it sent the backlog (202,472.5, about two months of COMP since the last time the function was called) into the protocol for distribution to users,” Leshner wrote in a tweet Sunday morning.

Leshner noted that this brought the total comp at risk to 490,000 comp tokens, or about $162 million.

There are a few proposals to fix the bug, but Compound’s governance model is such that any changes to the protocol require a multiday voting window, and Gupta said it takes another week for the successful proposal to be executed.

In the meantime, this pool of cash is once again up for grabs for users who know how to exploit the bug.

Compound made clear that no supplied or borrowed funds were at risk, which is some consolation.

“No user funds are or were at risk so it’s not that big of a deal,” said Gupta. “Everyone kinda got diluted but didn’t lose anything directly.”

There are also some white hats in the community.

After the Compound founder begged users to voluntarily return the platform’s crypto tokens, some did. Leshner said that as of Sunday morning, about 117,000 comp tokens, or $38.7 million, had been returned.

But as Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and Quantum Economics founder, points out, how things play out with this bug is almost entirely beside the point. “The bigger issue is — can it happen again?” he said.

Compound is the world’s fifth-largest DeFi protocol with a total value locked of $10.3 billion, according to DeFi Llama, which provides ranking and metrics for DeFi protocols.

Greenspan said the protocol can easily absorb this loss and a lot of it will likely be returned, “but the larger issue would be if people lose confidence in the system’s ability to function properly.”

Gupta said one immediate problem is that the Comptroller account has given away comp tokens that were reserved for future rewards.

You can think of Comptroller as the heart of Compound, Gupta explained. It facilitates all core features like borrowing, lending, and rewarding.

Comptroller oversees the pool of cash used to pay rewards to users who provide their crypto to borrowers at a set interest rate, which is typically a single-digit APY.

“Future rewards might have to be reduced to make Comptroller solvent,” said Gupta.

Source link

The post $162 million up for grabs after bug in DeFi protocol Compound appeared first on The World News.

20/06/2021

The Kalathil family, spread across the Yakkara bridge on the banks of the Kannadi river that splits the Palakkad Municipality, is famous for having produced many sportsmen and medical professionals over the years.

The family, where sports runs deep, has at least one member connected to it in one way or another. The eldest of the 11 brothers – S Haridas – represented Calicut University while others have followed in his footsteps. Now, M Sreeshankar, a fourth-generation sportsman from the family and the son of the youngest of the 11 siblings including two sisters, is making waves in athletics.

Sreeshankar, the son of international triple jumper S Murali (and K S Bijimol) is hailed as one of India’s best bets to win a medal in the Tokyo Olympics. Both Murali and Bijimol were medal winners in international meets. Murali had won a silver medal in men’s triple jump during the 1989 Islamabad South Asian Games, while Bijimol won a silver medal in the girls 800m event and gold in 4x400m relay in the 1992 Asian junior meet. So it was natural that Sreeshankar, who was born on March 27, 1999, saw Olympic logos and sports motifs around him was attracted to sports.

The 22-year-old final-year BSc (Mathematics) student of Government Victoria College is the national record holder in long jump and currently the top sixth jumper in Asia. The young lad, along with javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra and the Indian relay teams, will be carrying the hopes of the nation in Tokyo.

M Sreeshankar with father and coach S Murali.

Unlike his peers who train under foreign coaches and compete in foreign meets, Sreeshankar is thoroughly homegrown and trains at the recently built synthetic track stadium of Government Medical College, Palakkad which is hardly two kilometres from their home. The stadium might be just two years old, but has no dressing rooms or even washrooms. So Sreeshankar set up a makeshift gym and a dressing room using aluminium sheets.

Come July 31 this boy will be competing for India in the men’s long jump event in the deferred Tokyo Olympics. Indians across the globe will be both rooting for the boy who left medicine and engineering courses before taking athletics as a pro career. At the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games, Sreeshankar, fondly called Shanku, finished sixth and swore that ‘I will be back’. Later that year, he leaped 8.20m in Bhubaneshwar and broke the 8-m barrier and overcame his mental block.

However, there was more hurdles along the way as he was also diagnosed with appendicitis and took time to recover.

Long jumper Sreeshankar ‘s PB is 8.26m.

Sreeshankar was under pressure to shift his base from Palakkad to Patiala and train with national campers with the Athletics Federation of India’s High-Performance Director Volker Herrmann. That was when Covid-19 struck, forcing him to find solace in books, music, and watching NBA matches.

Back home, ‘Shanku’ should have been a household name and at par with Olympian Suresh Babu or TC Yohannan who were the first to break into 8m clubs. But he is yet to become the star despite doing well on and off the field.

In an interview with indianexpress.com, Sreeshankar maintained that fame and stardom do not bother him at all.

“Past is past and whatever happens will happen,” Sreeshankar turned philosophical for a moment.

Covid-19 induced lockdown took its toll as there were no trainings and meets. But then the Olympic Games itself was deferred.

So the Kalathil family huddled together and decided to buy a 5-cent vacant plot area in the lane where they stayed and set up a gym worth Rs 7 lakh.

Sreeshankar is 22 years old.

“Everyone chipped in. My brother brought the plot. Even Shanku contributed his scholarships amount, his cousins who were working donated generously. We are expecting more gym machines to arrive soon thanks to the state government,” Murali said while showing the modest gymnasium with machines used for squat exercises using weights.

On March 21 this year, he secured a berth at the Olympic Games with a jaw-dropping performance of 8.26m in Patiala.

“I never had any doubts about myself. It was only a matter of time. If everything falls in place, then I’ll make it,” he said assuring one and all. Not only did he qualify for the Olympics but also achieved a personal best of 8.20m, a national record that was set in Bhubaneshwar in 2018.

In 2018, Yohannan was first to predict that Sreeshankar will climb the Olympic podium if he strengthens his lower body. His mother Bijimol, who works at the Food Corporation of India (FCI), looks after his diet and nutrition while his dad-turned-coach Murali has been in charge of his fitness for the past 10 years.

Sreeshankar is ranked 34 in the World Athletics rankings released on July 15 and is way behind favourites Juan Miguel Echevarría of Cuba (8.60m plus), Tajay Gayle of Jamaica (8.60m plus), and JuVaughn Harrison of the USA (8.40m plus).

“All I need is three to four international contests before the actual competition begins. I’m capable of doing it,” Sreeshankar signed off before boarding the flight to Patiala to compete in Indian Grand Prix-4 (on June 21, Monday) and National Inter-State Athletics Championships (from June 25 to 29).

Source link

The post At 22, M Sreeshankar aims to fly high at Tokyo Olympic Games appeared first on The World News.

The World News ⋆