• After its rescue from the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve, a rare animal, pangolin, is giving a tough time to the forest officials in the Nahargarh Biological Park near Jaipur in captivity.
• The endangered mammal has refused to accept any feed given by the park staff and is mostly spending time in a burrow, which it has dug out for itself.

• The Indian pangolin ( Manis crassicaudata), also called scaly anteater, has large and overlapping scales on its body.
• In the wild, pangolins survive on ants, termites and other invertebrates, such as larvae, flies, worms, earthworms and crickets, which are difficult to be procured in a zoo or in captive conditions.
• Pangolin is not commonly found in a State like Rajasthan and is threatened by hunting for its meat and various body parts, which are used in traditional medicines.
• The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists Indian pangolin as an endangered animal
• These solitary, primarily nocturnal animals, are easily recognized by their full armor of scales.
• Pangolins or scaly anteaters are mammals of the order Pholidota.
• They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin, and they are the only known mammals with this feature.
• They roll into a ball when threatened which can make them easy pickings for poachers.
• Pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world-with demand primarily in Asia and in growing amounts in Africa-for their meat and scales.
• Eight species of pangolins are found on two continents. They range from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered.
• All eight pangolin species are protected under national and international laws, and two are listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

• The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi has paid tributes to the great Gopal Krishna Gokhale on his birth anniversary.

• He was an Indian 'moderate' political leader and a social reformer during the Indian independence movement.
• Gokhale was a senior leader of the Indian National Congress and the founder of the Servants of India Society.
• Through the Society as well as the Congress and other legislative bodies he served in, Gokhale campaigned for Indian self-rule and for social reforms.
• He was the leader of the moderate faction of the Congress party that advocated reforms by working with existing government institutions, and a major member of the Poona Association or the Poona Sarvajainik Sabha.
• Gokhale's deep concern with social reform led him to found the Servants of India Society (1905), whose members took vows of poverty and lifelong service to the underprivileged.
• He opposed the ill-treatment of untouchables, or low-caste Hindus, and also took up the cause of impoverished Indians living in South Africa.
• Gandhi regarded Gokhale as his political mentor, and wrote a book in Gujarati dedicated to the leader titled ‘Dharmatma Gokhale'.

• The Prime Minister has paid tributes to Gurudev Tagore on his Jayanti.

• Tagore, who was also known as ‘Gurudev,' was born on 7 May 1861 in Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the ancestral home of the Tagore's, in Kolkata, which was then known as Calcutta and was the capital of British India.
• He was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter.
• He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.
• He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
• Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi.
• At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.
• By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name.
• As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist,he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain.
• As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in his founding of Visva-Bharati University.
• Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works,
• His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's "Jana Gana Mana" and Bangladesh's "Amar Shonar Bangla". The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.
• Jiban Smriti (My Reminiscences), Rabindranath Tagore's autobiography, which he wrote when he was only 50 years old.

• Maharana Pratap was born as Pratap Singh I, to Uday Singh II, the founder of Udaipur city, and his first wife, Jaivantabai Songara.
• Pratap was born in the same year when Uday Singh ascended the throne of the Mewar royal family.
• He belonged to the Royal Family of Mewar.
• Born on May 9, 1545, Maharana Pratap is celebrated as the first native freedom fighter of our nation.
• He is remembered for his defiance of Akbar and the bravery of his loyal horse, Chetak. Maharana boldly fought against the Mughal Empire at a time when others had accepted
• Pratap Singh I, popularly known as Maharana Pratap, was a king of Mewar from the Sisodia dynasty.
• Pratap became a folk hero for his military resistance against the expansionism of the Mughal Empire under Akbar through Guerrilla warfare which proved inspirational for later rebels against Mughals including Shivaji.

• Akbar sent several diplomatic missions to convince Pratap to accept Mughal suzerainty, but Pratap refused to bow down to him.
• As a result, the Battle of Haldighati was fought, in 1576, on June 18, at Haldighati mountain pass, Aravalli Range, Rajasthan.
• Despite defeating Pratap, Akbar failed to capture or kill the latter or his family members.
• In the Battle Haldighati, Pratap, riding on Chetak, was attacking Mughal army leader Man Singh I of Amber, who was on an elephant.
• Pratap recaptured many of the Mewar territories captured by the Mughal Empire, but failed to win back Chittor, the heart of the Mewar Kingdom.
• Pratap's son Amar Singh I accepted Mughal supremacy and was allowed to enter Chittor.

• The Indian government recently passed a rule requiring all the VPN service providers to collect and store user data for up to five years, which runs counter to most such networks' primary mission.

• Titled "Directions under sub-section (6) of section 70B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 relating to information security practices, procedure, prevention, response and reporting of cyber incidents for Safe & Trusted Internet", the new directive from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology was released on April 28.
• According to the government, VPN providers have two months to comply with the laws and begin data collection.
• The new directive mandates they must maintain all customer data for five years.
• The reason given by CERT-In is that it requires the ability to investigate potential cybercrime
• VPN service providers have said the new directive would mean a total loss of privacy for the users-one of the most important unique selling points of such services.

Know! about IP address

• Any and all devices connected to the internet are a part of a large network of computers, servers and other devices spread across the world.
• To identify each device connected to the internet, service providers globally assign a unique address to each such device called the internet protocol address or IP address.
• It is this IP address that helps websites, law enforcement agencies and even companies track down individual users and their accurate location.

Know! about Virtual private network

• A virtual private network, when switched on, essentially creates a safe network within the larger global network of the internet and masks the IP address of the user by rerouting the data.
• Acting as a tunnel, a VPN takes data originating from one server and masks it in a different identity before delivering it to the destination server.
• In essence, a VPN creates several proxy identities for your data and delivers it safely without disturbing the content of the data.

PULSARS

What's the NEWS

• An object that astronomers thought was a distant galaxy has now been discovered as the brightest extra-galactic pulsar ever seen.
• This pulsar could be the most luminous one ever found- 10 times brighter than any other detected.
• The newly found pulsar - called PSR J0523-7125 - is located well beyond the limits of the Milky Way within the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• A pulsar (from pulsating radio source) is a neutron star that rotates quickly and releases two polarised radio lights.
• The beams create a unique timing and polarisation signature as they burst across space.
• Pulsars are among the few celestial objects that emit circular polarised light.

1. rotation-powered pulsars, where the loss of rotational energy of the star provides the power,
2. accretion-powered pulsars, where the gravitational potential energy of accreted matter is the power source (producing X-rays that are observable from the Earth),
3. magnetars, where the decay of an extremely strong magnetic field provides the electromagnetic power.

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