Dharmendra Pradhan steps down after demonstrations over exam leak scandal, in major victory for protesters
India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, has resigned after a week of mass demonstrations, handing a major victory to a new youth movement that has posed an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi’s government.
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, Pradhan said he had submitted his letter of resignation to the prime minister after student pressure.
Continue reading...Comment follows news Axel Rudakubana had been transferred from prison to psychiatric hospital
The lawyer for the families of Axel Rudakubana’s victims has said the Southport killer is “trying to retraumatise the families from his cell” after it emerged he had been transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital.
Rudakubana, now 19, was given a life sentence for the murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and the attempted murder of eight other children and two adults.
Continue reading... Stage 20 runs for brutal 170.9km and concludes at Ale d’Huez
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156km to go My inbox is open for your emails today. I had a lot of incredible submissions when I tried this earlier this week, so let’s go for it again: send me your favourite Tour de France memories. I’d love to hear your stories of watching either on the side of the road, mountain or on your sofa, just a meaningful moment. The email is in the link at the top of the page.
157km to go Barguil and Steinhauser have pulled clear, but Abrahmsen is on their tail. The peloton is not far back, just 33secs. The riders are on the first of four categorised climbs today, this is one of three hors category mountains in today’s road book. The Col de la Croix de Fer is 24km at an average of 5.2%, but much of it steeper than that. It looks bloody tough.
Continue reading...No press briefing has been held for months, as the defence department belatedly or inaccurately releases figures
The Pentagon is taking a “shameful approach” to releasing information about US casualties in the Iran war, Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, has told the Guardian.
The defence department has not held a press briefing for two-and-a-half months. Officials have faced accusations that they are engaged in a cover-up designed to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, fearing a public backlash before November’s midterm elections.
Continue reading...Lucy Harrison, 23, was shot in 2025 with her father’s gun. He was never arrested and a grand jury chose not to indict him
Lucy Harrison felt that 2024 was her best year yet. The 23-year-old had graduated from university with first class honours, landed her dream job and bought her first house with her boyfriend.
She was a “big girl adult” now, Lucy would say. She shed tears of joy seeing her idol, Taylor Swift, at Wembley on the Eras tour that summer. Life could hardly get any better. “All the hard work, all the tears, everything was coming to fruition,” said her mother, Jane Coates, from Warrington in north-west England.
Continue reading...After a Kyiv visit, rightwing firebrand now supports Ukraine – but perhaps it’s just because Trump favors a winner
Laura Loomer, the online Maga provocateur, has never worked in the White House or anywhere else in the government, but her sudden conversion to the Ukrainian cause this week is significant because her social media posts often have real policy implications in the second Trump administration.
The rightwing commentator has spent the last few days in Kyiv, where she announced a newfound sympathy for Ukraine in its long war with Russia, and admitted that she had previously fallen for Russian propaganda.
Continue reading...The Brazilian photographer was drawn to the train passengers lost in their books on a soggy March evening
“São Paulo is a place that we love and hate,” says Simone Arruda of her Brazilian home city. “And anyone who knows it knows that when it rains, everything turns to chaos.”
Arruda took this shot at rush hour on a soggy March evening. She was heading home via Brás station, “a massive hub in a neighbourhood that is always extremely busy due to its intense commerce”, she says.
Continue reading...Tour comes amid Argentinian president’s declining popularity and far-right victories across Latin America
Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, is not particularly fond of travelling to multilateral forums – it is not unusual for him to skip Mercosur summits, as he did a few weeks ago.
But on Saturday he begins a tour of Latin America to meet far-right leaders, starting in Brazil with the launch of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign against the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ahead of October’s election.
Continue reading...WASHINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De regering-Trump wordt geconfronteerd met nieuwe juridische procedures tegen de recentste reeks wereldwijde Amerikaanse importheffingen die deze week zijn ingegaan. Kleine bedrijven hebben twee rechtszaken aangespannen bij de Amerikaanse handelsrechtbank in New York.
Ze beschuldigen Trump ervan dat Sectie 301 van de handelswet uit 1974 onrechtmatig is ingezet om eerdere handelstarieven te vervangen die door het Amerikaanse Hooggerechtshof onwettig waren verklaard. Trump besloot na het oordeel van de hoogste rechters op basis van de wet uit 1974 snel met nieuwe heffingen te komen.
De Amerikaanse regering kondigde deze week aan dat de Verenigde Staten importheffingen van 10 tot 12,5 procent gaan innen op goederen van tientallen handelspartners, waaronder de Europese Unie. Regeringsfunctionarissen noemden als reden voor de nieuwe heffingen de vermeende lakse handhaving op verboden dwangarbeid.
NEW DELHI (ANP/AFP/RTR) - De Indiase onderwijsminister Dharmendra Pradhan stapt op na de aanhoudende demonstraties in het land, de grootste in jaren. De jonge betogers eisten onder meer zijn vertrek na een reeks onregelmatigheden bij belangrijke examens.
Hun woede ontstond na onder meer het uitlekken van een toelatingsexamen, waardoor miljoenen mensen de toets opnieuw moesten doen, en een storing in een onlinebeoordelingssysteem. De betogingen weerspiegelen ook de onvrede over werkloosheid, corruptie en het gebrek aan verantwoording door de overheid. Het nieuws over Pradhan werd onder betogers met gejuich ontvangen.
Duizenden jongeren hebben zich sinds juni aangesloten bij protesten van de kakkerlakkenbeweging (CJP). Die voerde deze week tweemaal overleg met de regering. Zaterdag is er een derde overleg. Volgens een woordvoerder van de CJP willen de betogers onder meer compensatie voor gedupeerden van de onregelmatigheden en willen zij dat alle juridische procedures tegen de betogers worden ingetrokken.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het Openbaar Ministerie (OM) heeft in 2025 een record aan crimineel vermogen in beslag genomen. Het gaat om 433 miljoen euro aan geld en goederen. Het is het vierde jaar op rij dat de cijfers zijn gestegen.
In 2024 ging het om bijna 410 miljoen euro, het jaar daarvoor ruim 360 miljoen euro. Het OM heeft voor 2,9 miljard aan afgepakte goederen en geld in beheer.
In totaal zijn in 2025 door het OM 3882 witwaszaken afgerond. In Nederland is dat jaar een bedrag van circa 18,3 miljoen euro aan cryptovaluta in beslag genomen. Een jaar daarvoor ging het om veel meer, 46,9 miljoen euro. Ook zijn er vele tientallen miljoenen aan cryptovaluta bevroren of in beslag genomen in het buitenland.
Het OM zegt zich meer te focussen op zaken waarbij de onder- en bovenwereld sterk met elkaar verweven zijn. Verder moet er volgens het OM meer informatie worden uitgewisseld tussen overheden, maar ook tussen overheid en private partijen.
mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual magic.
First, scientists have uncovered a “golden age” of languages that flourished for millennia before fading into our dark age of linguistic extinction. Then, Alan Turing’s erotica, the search for the first exomoon, and the cave of the Old Ancestors.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Blasi, Damián et al. The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene. Science.
Some 3,000 years ago, a “golden age” of languages dawned around the world, resulting in the proliferation of tens of thousands of tongues over the next 2,000 years. But over the past millennia, we have entered a dark age of linguistic diversity, driven by the rise of “behemoth languages” that have pushed others into extinction.
That’s the conclusion of a new study that reconstructed humanity’s linguistic diversity since the dawn of agriculture, which emerged about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.
The global human population before agriculture is estimated to have been between 4.4 and seven million people. Modern hunter-gatherer societies can act as rough proxies for the likely distribution, sizes, and linguistic diversity of these preagricultural populations. With that in mind, researchers led by Damián Blasi of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona developed a model based on 171 hunter-gatherer groups, which suggested that humans spoke about 4,500 to 6,000 languages before the dawn of agriculture. That’s fewer than the 7,500 that are spoken today, but still a lot considering how few people there were on Earth at the time.
The team then ran thousands of models predicting how languages diversified and evolved as humans adopted plant and animal domestication, a process that radically increased populations and complexified cultures. The predictions converged around a scenario in which linguistic diversity peaked around 2,000 years ago with possibly as many 75,000 tongues spoken worldwide.
“We uncovered a linguistic ‘golden age’ with tens of thousands of languages 3,000 to 1,000 years ago,” Blasi’s team said in the study.”In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia.”
The spread of colonialism over the past 500 years has accelerated language loss due to the ascent of behemoth languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi. But the new study suggests that linguistic diversity was already in decline starting at least 1,000 years ago due to the formation of smaller-scale multinational empires. Sadly, this trend of linguistic impoverishment has far-reaching consequences beyond language itself.
“Languages (and their histories) are regularly utilized as proxies for other units of culture because language is often transmitted and acquired along with other cultural traits, including marriage patterns, religious practices, kinship systems, or modes of social organization,” the team concluded. “Therefore, cultural variants with transmission dynamics similar to those of languages have also undergone a recent mass extinction.”
In other news…
Alan Turing, the famed British mathematician who helped break the Nazi enigma code, packed a mind-boggling list of accomplishments into his short life. A foundational figure in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing died at just 41 of cyanide poisoning in the wake of horrific persecution from the British government for what was then the crime of being a gay man.
In his spare time from dramatically changing the course of history, Turing also tried his hand at writing fiction, according to a new study about his erotic short story “Pryce’s Buoy.” The draft is an autofictional account of Turing’s affair with his young lover Arnold Murray, a relationship that ultimately forced Turing to endure a sentence of chemical castration to avoid prison in the 1950s.
The draft is cut short before any sexual encounter between the characters—perhaps because Turing’s family censored it, or perhaps because Turing left it unfinished—though the tale is very clearly headed to the bedroom. Sarah Dillon of the University of Cambridge revisits the story in a new study that contextualizes it in the final years of Turing's life and links it directly to the works of gay writer Sir Angus Wilson by revealing that Turing copied many of Wilson’s stylistic choices.
“Wilson braved…dangers—he did not hide his homosexuality, and he did publish his work,” said Dillon in the study. “Turing did not hide his sexuality either, and although he did not publish his story, we cannot say whether this was through choice or because of the abrupt end to his life in June 1954.”
Turing’s life story is heartbreaking, but Dillon emphasized that “Pryce’s Buoy” is an expression of his playful, cheeky side, which persisted even in the midst of the immense injustice to which he was subjected.
Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit other stars, but nobody has clearly spotted an “exomoon” orbiting one of these exoplanets. Now, a team reports the discovery of a Jupiter-sized world that is orbiting a massive object called a brown dwarf that is, in turn, orbiting a star called CD-35 2722, which is about 73 light years from Earth.
This might be the first known exomoon, but the system is so weird and novel that researchers aren’t quite sure that’s the right term. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called “failed stars” because they are about as big as a gas planet can get without igniting nuclear fusion in their cores and transforming into stars. Moons orbit planets, and brown dwarfs are somewhere in between a planet and a star, so the team went with the term “exosatellite.”
“Exoplanet satellites can be easily described as exomoons, but it is not clear if satellites of brown dwarf companions can be called the same, as the term lacks a formal definition,” said researchers led by Kevin Hoy of Diego Portales University. “Perhaps we are approaching the limit of language invented to describe the Solar System, which is entirely unlike CD-35 2722.”
This is why you should always bring a poet! Whether or not the giant exosatellite gets minted as the first exomoon, the discovery is an exciting example of how diverse star systems are increasingly coming into focus.
For at least 25,000 years, the “Old Ancestors” of Aboriginal Australians gathered to burn grass and perform magic rituals within Cloggs Cave, a cavernous site several hundred miles east of Melbourne.
While the immense significance of the cave is well-known to the GunaiKurnai people of the region, as well as to generations of archaeologists, a new study has confirmed the deep roots of the site as a ritual setting for the Old Ancestors. Researchers led by Elle Grono of the Australian National University unearthed layers of “phytoliths,” which are mineral structures found in plant cells, to corroborate that the cave has been a site of magic and healing for 25,000 years.
“Taken together, the archaeological features and multiple lines of archaeobotanical evidence at Cloggs Cave corroborates traditional GunaiKurnai knowledge and nineteenth century ethnography of ritual practices involving the use of plant resources, indicating that the cave was a special, secluded place used by mulla-mullung, powerful learned men and women, for the practice of magic, healing, cursing and spiritual practices,” said the team in their new study.
In our disorienting time of ephemeral reels and shortened attention spans, there’s inspiration in the incredible continuity of this storied cave, which has witnessed thousands of generations seeking solace in its confines.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
