📌 WHAT: The Delhi Police, in an affidavit has told the Supreme Court, that no anti-Muslim hate speech was made by Suresh Chavhanke, the editor-in-chief of Sudarshan News at a religious conclave organised in Delhi in December by the Hindu Yuva Vahini.
🗯 DESPITE widely available videos where Chavhanke can be seen administering an oath to “die for and kill” to make India a “Hindu rashtra”.
🚨 POLICE SAYS: “There is no use of such words which mean an ‘open call for genocide of Muslims’…The speech does not disclose any hate words towards a particular community…Nothing was said which could create an environment of paranoia against any religion.”
📌 CONTEXT: On Tuesday, Santosh Patil, 40, a contractor was found dead in a Udupi hotel.
✏️ In a purported suicide note, he unequivocally blamed Karnataka Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Eshwarappa for his suicide.
❗️Last month, Patil had accused the minister of harassing him for commissions as a precondition to receiving due payments for projects he had implemented for the government over a year ago.
👋 NOW: After days of refusing to do so, Eshwarappa has announced he will resign tomorrow, amid mounting pressure from the Opposition and his own party members.
🚨 FYI: Eshwarappa, who maintains he does not know Patil and asked for no bribes—has been booked for abetment of suicide under the IPC.
#NEWSWORTHY SNIPPETS
MINI-STORIES WORTH YOUR ATTENTION
Today, at least six workers died and 13 were injured after a fire broke out at a pharmaceutical unit in Andhra Pradesh's Eluru district. In Delhi's Jamia Nagar, 13 were injured following a cylinder blast in a resutaurant.
Sanoujam Shyamcharan Singh, an Imphal-based lawyer and Manipur Congress spokesperson has been arrested on charges of sedition for allegedly using derogatory language against Amit Shah during a television debate on the Home Minister's plan to introduce Hindi to school syllabi in the state.
The New York Police has arrested 62-year-old Frank James for a shooting at a Brooklyn subway station on Tuesday that left 23 people injured.
🇺🇸 CONTEXT: At the recently held annual India-US 2+2 talks, US Secretary of State Blinken had said that Washington was monitoring “recent concerning developments in India”, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials.
🇮🇳 INDIA RESPONDS: EAM Jaishankar clarified that the meeting was focused on “political-military affairs”; human rights were not discussed.
🗯 ON THE RECORD: “Look, people are entitled to have views about us. But we are also equally entitled to have views about their views and about the interests, and the lobbies and the vote banks which drive that...So, we take up human rights issues when they arise in [the US], especially when they pertain to our community. And in fact, we had a case yesterday [Tuesday] that’s really where we stand on that.”
📌 WHAT HAPPENED: Two Sikh men were assaulted in an alleged hate crime incident in New York on Tuesday. Another Sikh person was attacked in the same area 10 days ago.
💴 WHAT: Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for $41 billion, days after rejecting a seat on its board (which would have prevented him from taking over the company).
🖊 WHY: "Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company."—Musk to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor
📄 WHAT NOW: Musk has made a formal offer, calling it his best and final one. If not accepted, he says he will "reconsider" his position as a stakeholder.
💰 CAN HE AFFORD IT? Yes. Musk's net worth about $260 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, compared with Twitter’s market valuation of about $37 billion.
📱 CHANGES GALORE: Since it was announced on April 4 that Musk had bought 9.2% shares in Twitter, he has been busy updating his 80 million followers on the platform of the changes he intends to make as the single largest stakeholder in the company, including turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter and adding an edit button for tweets.
📣 FOUL PLAY: A Twitter shareholder has filed a lawsuit against Musk for failing to disclose his 9.2% stake in the company in time.
📌 US rules say a person has to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission when their stake in a publicly traded company exceeds 5%. This notification usually sends the share prices soaring.
🗓 Musk bought Twitter shares on March 14, but disclosed the fact only 20 days later, and so continued buying shares at a lower price.
🙂 FYI: Twitter’s stock price jumped 27% as soon as Musk made his announcement.
🌳 WHAT: The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is (still) shrinking.
🪓 In the first quarter of 2022, 941 square kilometers of forest were cleared from Janaury to the end of March.
🥅 An area equivalent to 1.75 lakh football fields, this is the largest area of deforestation recorded since 2016. It is also a 64% increase from the same time period last year.
🥼 SAYS WHO: Brazil’s space research agency, INPE.
🇧🇷 CONTEXT: Under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, the Amazon has been aggressively cleared for agriculture, mining, cattle ranching and timber, displacing animals and indigenous peoples.
📌 GETTING WORSE: 2020, deforestation surged to a 12-year high, as an area 14 times the size of New York City was razed. The Amazon also saw five times more deforestation in Jan 2022 than in Jan 2021.
🙂DID YOU KNOW: In April 2021, Bolsonaro pledged to double his government’s spending to reduce deforestation in the Amazon and stop it altogether by the end of the decade. Two days later, he cut the annual environmental budget by 23% from the previous year.
📣 REMINDER: In the cruelest of ironies, the Amazon, once a carbon sink, now maybe exhaling more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it absorbs.
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