BTW: 13-year-old Indian girl wins child prodigy award

Dubai: A 13-year-old Indian girl in Dubai has won the 100 Global Child Prodigy Award for singing in most languages during one concert and the longest live singing concert by a child, according to a media report on Friday. Sucheta Satish, a student in Dubai Indian High School, can sing in 120 languages, the Khaleej Time reported. Sucheta said, “I was selected for the award for my twin world records for singing in most languages during one concert and the longest live singing concert by a child which I had set as a 12-year-old two years ago in Dubai at the Indian Consulate Auditorium when I sang in 102 languages over 6.15 hours.” Satish recently launched her second album ‘Ya Habibi’ in the presence of Malayalam superstar Mammooty and actor Unni Mukundan. The award celebrates the talent of children in different categories — dancing, music, arts, writing, acting, modelling, science, innovation, sports. PTI

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‘World’s largest’ flower spotted in Indonesia

Padang: Indonesian conservationists say they’ve spotted the biggest specimen ever of what’s already been billed as one of the world’s largest flowers. The giant Rafflesia tuan-mudae — a fleshy red flower with white blister-like spots on its enormous petals — came in at a whopping 111 cm (3.6 foot) in diameter. That’s bigger than the previous record of 107 centimetres on a bloom also found in the jungles of West Sumatra several years ago. Ade Putra at the Agam Conservation Agency in Sumatra said the flower’s bloom would only last about one week. It was named Rafflesia after British colonialist Sir Stamford Raffles who spotted one in Indonesia in the early 19th century. The parasitic bloom, sometimes referred to as corpse flower, mimics the stench of rotting meat to attract insects. AFP

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US bans fruit, mint vaping cartridges

Washington: The US Food and Drug Administration has banned the sale of unauthorised flavoured cartridge-based e-cigarettes, including fruit and mint, in an attempt to reduce their use among children and youth. The decision on Thursday, in which companies have 30 days to cease manufacture, distribution and sales, aims to reduce the “troubling epidemic” among youth, although for some sectors it is seen as a step back from the original plan of the Trump administration to ban all flavours. “The US has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in the FDA statement. IANS