Marco Longhi, standing for Dudley North, wrote to British-Pakistani voters about Labour’s Sonia Kumar, underlining her surname

• UK election live – latest updates

A Conservative candidate has been criticised for sending letters to British-Pakistani voters allegedly insinuating they should vote for him instead of his Labour rival because of her Indian surname.

Marco Longhi, the Tory candidate fighting for re-election in Dudley North against Sonia Kumar, has been accused of using dog-whistle politics and attempting to “alienate British Hindus”.

Increasing use of fans, air coolers and air conditioners is placing ‘serious’ strain on grid in north of country

Engineers in India have warned of the possibility of prolonged power outages in the north, where a heatwave has brought misery for millions of people.

Demand for electricity has soared due to fans, air coolers and air conditioners being run constantly, placing a strain on the grid in Delhi and elsewhere in the north. Manufacturers of air conditioners and air coolers report sales rising by 40-50% compared with last summer.

Threat Actor ‘UTA0137’ Linked to Campaign

• The Pakistani time zone was hardcoded in one malware sample.
• There are weak infrastructure links to SideCopy, a known Pakistan-based threat actor.
• The Punjabi language was used in the malware.

Attack Starts With DSOP PDF

Discord Emojis Used for C2 Communication

• YARA rules
• Single value indicators

Nikhil Gupta accused of plotting to kill US resident who advocated for sovereign Sikh state in northern India

An Indian man suspected by the US of involvement in an unsuccessful plot to kill a Sikh separatist on American soil has been extradited to the US from the Czech Republic, the Czech justice minister said.

Nikhil Gupta has been accused by US federal prosecutors of plotting with an Indian government official to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US resident who has advocated for a sovereign Sikh state in northern India.

Being beholden to partners could be a necessary restraint on Indian PM – or he could double down on oppressive policies

As Narendra Modi traversed the country during recent months, campaigning for a third term in power, he repeated the same refrain. The past decade “was just a trailer”, the prime minister told crowds, adding: “There is plenty more to come.”

The expectation, among his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and most analysts and pollsters, was that India’s election would easily return him to power with the same – if not stronger – supermajority that he has enjoyed over the past decade.

Britain may be chilly, but from Greece to India, people are dying due to record temperatures. The death toll will grow without urgent action

While Britons don jumpers and complain about the unseasonable cold, much of the world has been reeling due to excessive temperatures. India has been in the grip of its longest heatwave in recorded history, with thermometers hitting 50C in some places. Greece closed the Acropolis in the afternoon last week as temperatures hit 43C; never has it seen a heatwave so early in the year. Soaring temperatures in the Sahel and western Africa saw mortuaries in Mali reportedly running short of space this spring, while swathes of Asia suffered in May.

Mexico and the south-west of the US have also endured blistering conditions; it was particularly shocking to hear Donald Trump pledge again to “drill, baby, drill” at a rally that saw supporters taken to hospital with heat exhaustion. These bouts of extreme weather are increasing as the climate crisis worsens. Although the El Niño weather pattern contributed to heatwaves over the last 12 months, they are becoming more frequent, extreme and prolonged thanks to global heating. By 2040, almost half the world’s inhabitants are likely to experience major heatwaves, 12 times more than the historic average.

Lingchi, or “death by a thousand cuts”, was a particularly brutal form of execution practised in Asia in ancient times: the condemned person was tied to a post and body parts were slowly sliced off one by one. The Indian-born photographer Sujata Setia uses this barbaric practice in her series A Thousand Cuts as a potent metaphor for a different kind of brutality – domestic abuse. In collaboration with the charity Shewise, Setia spent two years photographing survivors of abuse among the UK’s south Asian community. Using saanjhi, the Indian art of paper-cutting, she makes vivid red cuts in her portraits to express her subjects’ anguish: “I wanted to show how the scars are not only external but internal,” she says. Having grown up witnessing domestic violence, Setia initially resisted turning the camera on herself. “But there came a point where I realised I had to own my own scars.” Taking her own portrait and placing it alongside the others in the series has been “absolutely the most healing process,” she says.

• Setia is the winner of the creative category of the Sony world photography awards 2024, professional competition. The 2024 awards book is available to buy at worldphoto.org. In the UK, the national domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247, or visit womensaid.org.uk

Official from ruling BJP party allows action against Booker winner under controversial anti-terrorism law

Indian authorities have granted permission for the prosecution of the Booker prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy over comments she made about Kashmir at an event in 2010.

The top official in the Delhi administration, VK Saxena, gave the go-ahead for legal action against Roy, whose novel The God of Small Things won the Booker prize in 1997, under anti-terrorism legislation, alongside a former university professor, Sheikh Showkat Hussain.

Understanding Blockchain Technology

Key Components of Blockchain That Ensure Data Security

Applications Across Sectors

Key Challenges and Considerations

Growth of Blockchain Technology in India

Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Volexity flag two Pakistani espionage campaigns targeting Indian government entities.

The post Pakistani Threat Actors Caught Targeting Indian Gov Entities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Forced to travel far to find gruelling work making bricks, women and children fall sick but cannot access healthcare

The phrase “khat rahein hain” (“being worn down”) is how Suma Devi describes her 16 years of labouring at the brick kilns near the city of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, more than 500 miles from her own state of Bihar.

Six years ago Devi had just given birth to her baby daughter when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and put on a nine-month course of antibiotics. It is an effective way to treat TB but Devi had to abandon the course halfway through to find work at the Madhav brick kiln in Naujheel, far from her home in a village near the city of Gaya.

As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.

The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians. By some estimates, millions of Indian voters viewed deepfakes.

But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for the most part the campaigns, candidates and activists used AI constructively in the election. They used AI for typical political activities, including mudslinging, but primarily to better connect with voters.

Deepfakes without the deception

Political parties in India spent an estimated US$50 million on authorized AI-generated content for targeted communication with their constituencies this election cycle. And it was largely successful.

Indian political strategists have long recognized the influence of personality and emotion on their constituents, and they started using AI to bolster their messaging. Young and upcoming AI companies like The Indian Deepfaker, which started out serving the entertainment industry, quickly responded to this growing demand for AI-generated campaign material.

In January, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, former chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu for two decades, appeared via video at his party’s youth wing conference. He wore his signature yellow scarf, white shirt, dark glasses and had his familiar stance—head slightly bent sideways. But Karunanidhi died in 2018. His party authorized the deepfake.

In February, the All-India Anna Dravidian Progressive Federation party’s official X account posted an audio clip of Jayaram Jayalalithaa, the iconic superstar of Tamil politics colloquially called “Amma” or “Mother.” Jayalalithaa died in 2016.

Meanwhile, voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation. Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) workers like Shakti Singh Rathore have been frequenting AI startups to send personalized videos to specific voters about the government benefits they received and asking for their vote over WhatsApp.

Multilingual boost

Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his “new AI technology” as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time.

In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi’s personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi’s speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi.

As part of their demos, some AI companies circulated their own viral versions of Modi’s famous monthly radio show “Mann Ki Baat,” which loosely translates to “From the Heart,” which they voice cloned to regional languages.

Adversarial uses

Indian political parties doubled down on online trolling, using AI to augment their ongoing meme wars. Early in the election season, the Indian National Congress released a short clip to its 6 million followers on Instagram, taking the title track from a new Hindi music album named “Chor” (thief). The video grafted Modi’s digital likeness onto the lead singer and cloned his voice with reworked lyrics critiquing his close ties to Indian business tycoons.

The BJP retaliated with its own video, on its 7-million-follower Instagram account, featuring a supercut of Modi campaigning on the streets, mixed with clips of his supporters but set to unique music. It was an old patriotic Hindi song sung by famous singer Mahendra Kapoor, who passed away in 2008 but was resurrected with AI voice cloning.

Modi himself quote-tweeted an AI-created video of him dancing—a common meme that alters footage of rapper Lil Yachty on stage—commenting “such creativity in peak poll season is truly a delight.”

In some cases, the violent rhetoric in Modi’s campaign that put Muslims at risk and incited violence was conveyed using generative AI tools, but the harm can be traced back to the hateful rhetoric itself and not necessarily the AI tools used to spread it.

The Indian experience

India is an early adopter, and the country’s experiments with AI serve as an illustration of what the rest of the world can expect in future elections. The technology’s ability to produce nonconsensual deepfakes of anyone can make it harder to tell truth from fiction, but its consensual uses are likely to make democracy more accessible.

The Indian election’s embrace of AI that began with entertainment, political meme wars, emotional appeals to people, resurrected politicians and persuasion through personalized phone calls to voters has opened a pathway for the role of AI in participatory democracy.

The surprise outcome of the election, with the BJP’s failure to win its predicted parliamentary majority, and India’s return to a deeply competitive political system especially highlights the possibility for AI to have a positive role in deliberative democracy and representative governance.

Lessons for the world’s democracies

It’s a goal of any political party or candidate in a democracy to have more targeted touch points with their constituents. The Indian elections have shown a unique attempt at using AI for more individualized communication across linguistically and ethnically diverse constituencies, and making their messages more accessible, especially to rural, low-income populations.

AI and the future of participatory democracy could make constituent communication not just personalized but also a dialogue, so voters can share their demands and experiences directly with their representatives—at speed and scale.

India can be an example of taking its recent fluency in AI-assisted party-to-people communications and moving it beyond politics. The government is already using these platforms to provide government services to citizens in their native languages.

If used safely and ethically, this technology could be an opportunity for a new era in representative governance, especially for the needs and experiences of people in rural areas to reach Parliament.

This essay was written with Vandinika Shukla and previously appeared in The Conversation.

Reverend, pastor and professor, who was a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr, dies in Los Angeles after short illness

The Rev James Lawson Jr, an apostle of nonviolent protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white authorities as the civil rights movement gained traction, has died, his family said on Monday. He was 95.

His family said Lawson died on Sunday after a short illness in Los Angeles, where he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor.

Suhani Shah turned professional in first grade – and she has even had to convince people she’s not actually magic

There are stage parents and then there are Suhani Shah’s. When Shah – at age six – told her father she wanted to be a magician, he didn’t just encourage her: he told her, go big. Don’t get stuck doing tricks for your school friends or at birthday parties, he warned: “Your vision needs to be bigger. Put together a whole show.”

Wait – he was saying this to a six-year-old? Shah, now 34, laughs. “Yes!” she says. “I’m sure I didn’t understand it. I probably said yes just so I could do it.”

Microsoft India X Account Hacked

Hijacking Verified X Account: A Trend

Enlarge / A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China's Shandong province. (credit: VCG via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don't use the wrong names.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea's latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country's northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

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Ahead of the election in India, the Guardian’s video team travelled through the country to explore how fake news and censorship might shape the outcome.

Almost one billion people are registered to vote. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has been in power for more than 10 years, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is seeking a third term.

But critics of Modi and the BJP say his government has become increasingly authoritarian, fracturing the country along religious lines and threatening India’s secular democracy. At the same time, the space for freedom of speech has been shrinking while disinformation and hate speech has exploded on social media.

Meta has threatened to pull WhatsApp out of India if the courts try to force it to break its end-to-end encryption.