Infinity Social Updates

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Assam on Friday, announcing multi-billion-dollar investments as part of a tour of states heading into elections, including the key political battleground of West Bengal. The Hindu nationalist leader launched infrastructure projects in Assam — including land holdings to tea plantation workers, a dam project and a major train and road corridor — worth over $5 billion. The northeastern state of about 32 million people is controlled by his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On Saturday, Modi will visit neighbouring West Bengal, a state of 105 million people led by his political rival Mamata Banerjee, of the All India Trinamool Congress party. During the visit, he is expected to inaugurate “road infrastructure, railways, port and shipping” projects worth roughly $2 billion, which his office says are aimed at “accelerating economic growth”. State elections this year will be held in the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, both ...

PML-N leader Nehal Hashmi will be sworn in as the new governor of Sindh, following his surprise appointment a day earlier, Radio Pakistan reported on Friday. Hashmi will be sworn in as the governor in Karachi today. Sindh High Court Chief Justice Zafar Ahmed Rajput will administer his oath. On Thursday, President Asif Ali Zardari approved Hashmi’s appointment as Sindh governor, hours after it was announced that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif recommended his appointment to the post previously held by MQM’s Kamran Tessori. A brief statement issued by the PM Office said that PM Shehbaz met Hashmi at the PM House and decided to nominate him as the governor of Sindh. Hashmi is a veteran politician who last served as a PML-N senator after his election in March 2015. However, a controversial speech the PML-N senator made in May 2017 landed him in hot water, culminating in his disqualification in February 2018. The surprise move to appoint Hashmi has drawn a strong reaction from ally ...

Higher oil prices due to the Iran war are increasing prices of jet fuel, which accounts for a big portion of airlines’ costs. Brent crude oil rose near $100 per barrel on Thursday on worries about disrupted supply. Spot Northwest European jet fuel prices were at $1,536 per metric tonne on Thursday, trading near an all-time high of $1,633 they reached intra-day on Monday. Some airlines use futures and options to hedge against price increases. They also try to hedge against value changes in the US dollar, in which jet fuel is priced. US airlines, which abandoned the practice of hedging against fuel costs, could be the hardest hit if the war is prolonged. Below is a summary of how some of the world’s largest airlines are hedged: Air France-KLM: The Franco-Dutch group said in February it had adjusted its fuel hedging policy to increase its total exposure over one year consumption to 87 per cent from 68pc. It said it had extended its hedging horizon to eight quarters from six and inc...

A foreign hacker compromised files relating to the FBI’s investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a break-in at the bureau’s New York Field Office three years ago, according to ​a source familiar with the matter and recently published Justice Department documents reviewed by Reuters . The details of who accessed a server at the FBI’s New York Field Office, ‌including the allegation that a foreign hacker was involved, are being reported here for the first time. In a statement, the FBI said what it described as a “cyber incident” was “an isolated one”. “The FBI restricted access to the malicious actor and rectified the network. The investigation remains ongoing, so we do not have further comments to provide at this time.” Although the source said the intrusion appeared to have been carried out by a cybercriminal rather than a foreign government, ​the incident underscores the files’ potential intelligence value, one academic said. The legally mandated publication...

In contemporary international politics, the language of gender equality has increasingly appeared within the moral vocabulary of war over the past few decades. Western governments and political commentators have framed military interventions as necessary not only for security but also for the protection of women and girls in societies portrayed as oppressive or patriarchal. This discourse presents intervention as a form of humanitarian responsibility. Yet when the material consequences of such interventions are examined, a profound contradiction emerges. The recent bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Tehran during the US and Israeli strikes demonstrates this contradiction with stark clarity. When schoolchildren become casualties of imperial wars rhetorically justified through the language of women’s liberation, the ethical foundations of such claims demand serious scrutiny. The politics of “saving” Muslim women The use of women’s rights as a moral justification for military ...

On the 12th day of the US–Israel war against Iran, the maritime domain, particularly the Strait of Hormuz , clearly emerged as the principal flashpoint, shaping both the military trajectory of the war and the strategic calculations of the US as the contest over oil flows and shipping lanes began to define the central logic of the conflict. In the past 24 hours, at least three separate attacks were recorded against commercial vessels operating in or near the Strait of Hormuz, reinforcing the perception that Iran is now enforcing its threat to disrupt maritime traffic through direct kinetic pressure. The incidents occurred in quick succession and involved vessels from three different flag states, which pointed to the widening risks to global shipping. A Thailand-flagged bulk carrier, Mayuree Naree, was struck by an unidentified projectile roughly 11 nautical miles north of Oman inside the strait, triggering a fire that forced most of the crew to evacuate before the blaze was eventually...

China warned the United States on Wednesday that the excessive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its military could plunge the world into a Terminator like dystopian future. US President Donald Trump’s administration has sought the unconditional use of AI startups in the military. The Pentagon has confirmed Elon Musk’s Grok system is cleared for use in a classified setting, and blacklisted Anthropic after it refused to allow its Claude AI model to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous lethal warfare. “Such choices as the unrestricted application of AI by the military, using AI as a tool to violate the sovereignty of other nations, allowing AI to excessively affect war decisions, and giving algorithms the power to determine life and death, not only erode ethical restraints and accountability in wars, but also risk technological runaway,” a spokesman for China’s defence ministry, Jiang Bin, said on Wednesday. “A dystopia depicted in the American film The Terminator cou...