News in Short

• Facebook has been at the top of the list of cybercriminals for launching a cyberattack to steal personal information, according to a report by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
• Facebook was leveraged with 4.5 million phishing attempts between April and September this year, as per Kaspersky’s analysis. It was followed by Whatsapp and Amazon with 3.7 million and 3.3 million respectively.
• While Google’s offering including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive held sixth position with 1.5 million phishing attempts.
• Web services that employees of small and medium businesses most frequently access while working are some of the most exploited by malefactors as they are used as a springboard for phishing.

• A statue of “Common Man”, the signature creation of legendary cartoonist R.K. Laxman, will shortly come up at a school in Jaipur to mark the centenary year of his birth and commemorate his special connection with the Pink City.
• The iconic character’s statue will be built at Merry Lands School in Jaipur’s Malviya Nagar area. Laxman had attended many functions at the school and interacted with its students.
• Laxman’s work includes the pictures of humour drawn in 1950s and 60s and are relevant even now. An exhibition of Laxman’s artworks hosted by the Indian Embassy in Belgium last year was widely acclaimed.

• Britain and Japan formally signed a trade agreement, marking the UK's first big post-Brexit deal on trade, as it continues to struggle to agree on a deal with its closest trading partners in the European Union.
• Britain has said the deal meant 99% of its exports to Japan would be tariff-free, and that it could increase trade by 15.2 billion pounds ($19.9 billion) in the long run, compared with 2018.
• The deal removes Britain's tariffs on Japanese cars in stages to zero in 2026, which is the same as in the Japan-EU trade agreement.
• Japan is already a member of the CPTPP, which also links Canada, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

• The US Food and Drug Administration approved Gilead Sciences Inc.’s antiviral therapy remdesivir, making it the first drug to obtain formal clearance for treating the coronavirus.
• Regulators had granted an emergency-use authorization for remdesivir earlier this year, and since then the drug has become a widely used therapy in hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
• The drug hasn’t been proven to reduce deaths from Covid-19.  The approval is based on a US government-sponsored trial involving more than 1,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients that found that those who received the drug recovered about five days faster than those who got a placebo.

• During the southwest monsoon, Eastern Ghats provide the ideal climate for the butterflies to survive. The migratory adults become reproductive, breed, lay eggs, and die.
• This year, after a gap of eight years, early migration took place. The migratory butterflies started to travel back to the Western Ghats between the last week of August and September middle.
• The butterfly offspring population would not have been able to survive in the Eastern Ghats with unviable weather conditions and a lack of food, forcing an early migration.
• Butterflies are bio indicators, and the early migration means an early arrival of monsoon. With climate change altering weather phenomena across the world, tracking and studying seasonal butterfly migrations have assumed greater significance.