Today is Wren Day in Ireland and parts of England, where folk dancers and mummers such as the Wren-boys dance and perform songs like ‘hunting the Wren’ and ‘the Cutty Wren’. In Irish lore the Wren is called dreoilín derived from ‘dreán’ or ‘draoi éan' meaning the ‘druid bird', whilst other names for the bird include ‘Drui donn’ – the brown druid. There are different Irish, England and even Norse traditions all given for the origin of Wren day, many of them associating the Wren with paganism.
Today is Wren Day in Ireland and parts of England, where folk dancers and mummers such as the Wren-boys dance and perform songs like ‘hunting the Wren’ and ‘the Cutty Wren’. In Irish lore the Wren is called dreoilín derived from ‘dreán’ or ‘draoi éan' meaning the ‘druid bird', whilst other names for the bird include ‘Drui donn’ – the brown druid. There are different Irish, England and even Norse traditions all given for the origin of Wren day, many of them associating the Wren with paganism.
At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. During the operations, Sebi officials seized various records and documents, including 34 mobile phones, six laptops, four desktops, four tablets, two hard drive disks and one pen drive from the custody of these persons. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had “no plans to go back,” saying that the nation was currently “incompatible with internet business at the moment.” He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup. Unlike Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter, which run very public anti-disinformation programs, Brooking said: "Telegram is famously lax or absent in its content moderation policy." Some people used the platform to organize ahead of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and last month Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Durov urging him to curb Russian information operations on Telegram.
from ar
