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Student protests in India
Analysis: The cockroaches’ goal was to diminish Modi

When the Indian protest movement “Cockroach Party” forced the education minister to resign at the weekend, it may at first glance have seemed as if the victory they won was symbolically important but strategically insignificant, writes Mukul Kesavan in The Guardian.

The minister’s replacement is also a close ally of Narendra Modi and, from the point of view of the protesting students, is no improvement.

According to Kesavan, however, the protests were never really about the education minister. The goal was Modi.

“The point of the protest was to diminish Modi by forcing him to give in publicly,” he writes.

In the left-wing newspaper Jacobin, Komal Mohite believes that it would be a mistake to dismiss the protest movement as “a passing Gen Z phenomenon” or a middle-class issue movement.

In the centrist Foreign Policy, Michael Kugelman writes that the movement could also help to revive a dormant opposition. Over the weekend, a wide range of government opponents gathered outside parliament to protest the way the “cockroaches” have been treated by the police and the judiciary.

“What has unfolded on the streets of India in recent weeks is deeply significant,” he writes.

ICE operations
Federal agents use racist language internally

Members of the immigration police ICE use racist and derogatory terms when talking to each other about people of Latin American background, reports the LA Times.

The newspaper has seen materials that have been made public in connection with a legal attempt to stop the immigration police campaigns in California.

“Just send us wherever there are ‘tonks’ and we’ll go,” says an agent in one of the messages. Tonk is a derogatory term for Latin American, which is believed to refer to the sound made when a police officer hits a migrant in the head with a flashlight.

“Racism is very widespread and forms the basis of the entire work of the agency,” says Mayra Joachín, a lawyer at the civil rights organization ACLU, which is leading the legal process against ICE.

The change of power in the UK
Tory leader demands an end to early release

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is demanding that Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham completely scrap a planned law that means that criminals can be released after serving a third of their sentence, instead of having to serve at least half.

The idea was that the reform would reduce overcrowding in British prisons. However, after heavy criticism, the introduction was paused by the Labor government last week.

“It’s easy to lower bills and bus fares, but that doesn’t help when paedophiles and rapists are released onto our streets,” Badenoch told The Independent. 

Ebola outbreak
Uganda free from Ebola – infection increases in neighboring country

Uganda says the last Ebola patient in the country has been discharged and that the outbreak in the country is thus over, reports AP.

At the same time, the infection continues to spread in neighboring Congo-Kinshasa, where the number of cases has now passed 3,200. Aid workers warn that after just ten weeks, the number of infected people is already on par with the 2018-2020 outbreak, the largest in the country's history.

The outbreaks were caused by the relatively newly discovered Bundibugyo variant of the Ebola virus. The World Health Organization WHO has classified the situation as an international public health threat.

14 elephants found dead in Kenya – cause unknown

Kenya has launched an urgent investigation after 14 elephants were found dead in Amboseli National Park in the southern part of the country, reports BBC.

The country's wildlife agency said skin samples have been sent for analysis to determine whether disease, poisoning or other factors were behind the deaths.

It is the first time in decades that authorities have recorded such a large-scale elephant death.

The elephants are of different sexes and ages and are not believed to belong to the same herd, as they were found in different locations in the national park. So far, investigators have been unable to identify a common cause of death.