Microsoft 365 Services Outage Has Been Mitigated, Company Says

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WhatsApp Users May Soon Be Able to Change Its App Colours: Report

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Avoid auto stocks for now: Sandip Sabharwal

The result season becomes very important because unlike the last two quarters where expectations were low and companies delivered much better, now expectations are pretty high, says says Sandip Sabharwal, analyst, asksandipsabharwal.com. If the three major factors on the health front, in the debt market and also on the currency front are against us, what explains the market resilience?That is a question which all of us are asking ourselves. I think all traditional linkages seem to have broken down in the sense that typically you would think that if the dollar index rallies sharply, then we should see a selloff in emerging markets. The kind of fall we have seen in bonds, takes us into a space where today a lot of global bond funds are looking at giving a negative return if bond yields sustain at these levels for the full year. That has never happened in the last 50-60 years. And obviously there is the fear of Covid resurgence. I think a reverse logic works in the market these days. If things are not improving fast enough and liquidity will remain ample, interest rates will not be taken up, that will help sustain the market. But if you actually look at FII flows and the data, we have seen that some impact of the dollar rally and FII flows have actually been negative in the recent past barring one or two days. A large amount of buying in the market seems to be coming from domestic institutions. I think it has to be some of the insurance companies because mutual funds are still seeing net outflows on a net basis. In this context, the result season becomes very important because unlike the last two quarters where expectations were low and companies delivered much better, now expectations are pretty high. Many of the stocks are taking into account a continued significant improvement in profitability, which in the light of the commodity bull phase that we have seen and the squeeze on margins that could create is something which needs to be monitored. Why are auto stocks and metal stocks moving up in a synchronised manner? What is good for steel is not good for autos and what is good for autos is not good for steel which is raw material prices?Auto stocks actually saw a decent correction from the top. Most of the two- wheeler stocks are off 20-25% from the top. Stocks like Maruti or any of the other stocks are down between 10% and 25% from the top. Now it is a bounce back trade where people are seeing value given the reported numbers which are coming out for March. But I would say that these reported numbers of March should be taken with a pinch of salt because significant price hikes have been announced from April 1 by most of the auto companies after the price hikes in January. So there will obviously be a push of inventory into the market and pre-buying in March because a 3-5% price hike in auto is quite significant. The key will be to monitor data as it comes out from April where we will start seeing some softness. My guess is that the auto sector bounce back does not create an opportunity to buy afresh. It is best if we stay away as of now. How much of the IT growth is yet to be pencilled in? There are two factors to be considered in IT stocks. One is what is the kind of growth outlook that we are looking for? In my view 8-10% kind of growth is already factored into the stock prices. Whether these companies can see double digit growth or not, needs to be monitored and if they can do that, then we could see some more upside. The second more important thing will be the margin outlook because if it is uncharacteristically strong vis-à-vis most of the other emerging market currencies and to that extent what is the impact of the rupee strength on their margins is something we will need to see. Cost savings will continue because travel is still restricted and that is one lever which these companies will still be able to use to do short-term margins. But the margin outlook will determine further moves in these stocks because most of the growth is more or less factored into these prices.

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Can vaccinated people spread the virus?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.The assertion called into question the precautions that the agency had urged vaccinated people to take just last month, like wearing masks and gathering only under limited circumstances with unvaccinated people.“Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview,” an agency spokesperson told The Times. “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get COVID-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”The agency was responding in part to criticism from scientists who noted that current research was far from sufficient to claim that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus.The data suggest that “it’s much harder for vaccinated people to get infected, but don’t think for one second that they cannot get infected,” said Paul Duprex, director of the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh.In a television interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Walensky referred to data published by the CDC showing that one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 80% effective at preventing infection, and two doses were 90% effective.That certainly suggested that transmission from vaccinated people might be unlikely, but Walensky’s comments hinted that protection was complete. “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” she said. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”Walensky went on to emphasize the importance of continuing to wear masks and maintain precautions, even for vaccinated people. Still, the brief comment was widely interpreted as saying that the vaccines offered complete protection against infection or transmission.In a pandemic that regularly spawns scientific misunderstanding, experts said they were sympathetic to Walensky and her obvious desire for Americans to continue to take precautions. It was only Monday that she said rising caseloads had left her with a sense of “impending doom.”“If Dr. Walensky had said most vaccinated people do not carry virus, we would not be having this discussion,” said John Moore, a virus expert at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.“What we know is the vaccines are very substantially effective against infection — there’s more and more data on that — but nothing is 100%,” he added. “It is an important public health message that needs to be gotten right.”Misinterpretation could disrupt the agency’s urgent pleas for immunization, some experts said. As of Wednesday, 30% of Americans had received at least one dose of a vaccine and 17% were fully immunized.“There cannot be any daylight between what the research shows — really impressive but incomplete protection — and how it is described,” said Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.“This opens the door to the skeptics who think the government is sugarcoating the science,” Bach said, “and completely undermines any remaining argument why people should keep wearing masks after being vaccinated.”All of the coronavirus vaccines are spectacularly successful at preventing serious disease and death from COVID-19, but how well they prevent infection has been less clear.Clinical trials of the vaccines were designed only to assess whether the vaccines prevent serious illness and death. The research from the CDC on Monday brought the welcome conclusion that the vaccines are also extremely effective at preventing infection.The study enrolled 3,950 health care workers, emergency responders and others at high risk of infection. The participants swabbed their noses each week and sent the samples in for testing, which allowed federal researchers to track all infections, symptomatic or not. Two weeks after vaccination, the vast majority of vaccinated people remained virus-free, the study found.Follow-up data from clinical trials support that finding. In results released by Pfizer and BioNTech on Wednesday, for example, 77 people who received the vaccine had a coronavirus infection, compared with 850 people who got a placebo.“Clearly, some vaccinated people do get infected,” Duprex said. “We’re stopping symptoms, we’re keeping people out of hospitals. But we’re not making them completely resistant to an infection.”The number of vaccinated people who become infected is likely to be higher among those receiving vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which have a lower efficacy, experts said. (Still, those vaccines are worth taking, because they uniformly prevent serious illness and death.)Infection rates may also be higher among people exposed to a virus variant that can sidestep the immune system.Cases across the country are once again on the upswing, threatening a new surge. Walensky’s comment came just a day after she made an emotional appeal to the American public to continue taking precautions.“I am asking you to just hold on a little longer, to get vaccinated when you can, so that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends,” she said.Given the rising numbers, it’s especially important that immunized people continue to protect those who have not yet been immunized against the virus, experts said.“Vaccinated people should not be throwing away their masks at this point,” Moore said. “This pandemic is not over.”

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ShareChat experiments with political ads

New Delhi: Homegrown social media firm ShareChat is experimenting with political ads on the platform as part of its monetisation strategy and to help political parties engage with their constituents.Tamil Nadu’s rival Dravidian parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), have been the first to run campaigns on the platform, which allows conversations in local languages. ShareChat is currently running a pilot campaign with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu for the upcoming state assembly elections on April 6. Palanivel Thiagarajan, the DMK’s sitting member of legislative assembly (MLA) from Madurai Central who is re-contesting from the same seat, has also used the platform for specific campaigns.The social media platform, which has close to 160 million monthly active users and is available in 15 local languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali and Assamese, will look to replicate the model to national parties in future.“As part of its focus on ad-based revenue monetisation model, ShareChat is experimenting with political advertising,” a source familiar with the development said, adding it has already launched an ad transparency portal and is also part of the Election Commission of India’s voluntary code of ethics.“With ShareChat being dominant in all the four states with Indic language focus, it expects to garner immense interest among political parties to design their language-led election campaigns for reaching out to possible voters,” the person added.ShareChat confirmed the development but declined to provide further comment.The campaigns as well as the spends by the AIADMK and Thiagarajan can be accessed on the transparency portal.“Sharechat is a globally local social media platform. It is not just ShareChat, we also engage with our constituents on all social media platforms. ShareChat is popular among rural masses,” said Aspire K Swaminathan, Secretary, IT wing of AIADMK.“Whether it is Facebook, Instagram or ShareChat, we engage with our target audience and build conversations around an issue,” Swaminathan added. US-based social media giants Facebook and Twitter have also talked about their ongoing efforts in the area of political campaigning and the tools that they have put in place to combat fake news and misinformation ahead of elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.For instance, Twitter said it has built public service announcements (PSAs) for the assembly elections and created moments in regional languages such as Bangla, Tamil besides Hindi and English.It has also created “pre-bunks” on subjects such as indelible ink and electronic voting machines (EVMs) in multiple languages to inoculate people against misinformation. It has also set guidelines to help curators understand what constitutes misleading content.Similarly, Facebook said that it is taking steps to enhance civic engagement, combat hate speech, limit misinformation and remove voter suppression.In a newsroom post, the company said it will significantly reduce the distribution of content that its proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement, in order to decrease the risk of problematic content going viral in these states and potentially inciting violence ahead of or during the elections.

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It was a brave call by Dhoni to bat ahead of Yuvraj in WC final, says Upton

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Fit-again Mohammed Shami raring to go in the IPL

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