¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Tenzing Lamsang @TenzingLamsang]

This gets worse.

So not only did the US Navy fire two missiles and kill three Indian sailors they refused to rescue the 24 Indian crew despite saying they are on fire, the vessel is sinking and that they are an all Indian crew.

The Omanis rescued them.

[Muthukrishnan Dhandapani @dmuthuk]

Interesting information from @jcrajan00

Tiruppur exported ₹42,500 crore worth of knitwear last year. That's $4.45 billion, 49% of India's entire garment exports, from just one town in Tamil Nadu.

No PLI. No special economic zone. No mega announcement. Just a cluster of small dyeing units from the 1970s that scaled through pure competitive pressure.

Funny how our most successful export stories are always the ones nobody planned.

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.

This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ

[Tim Stillman ⭐️⭐️ @timstillman_]

Undoubtedly my moment of 2025-26 was accidentally leaving my adapter in the plug socket at Leuven (a) in December only for us to draw them again in February, be assigned the same desk and find my adapter still in the socket totally untouched.

[Mr Sharma @sharma_views]

THIS 18-YEAR-OLD DID NOT BLINK 🔥

RAJDEEP: CBSE says TCS quoted around ₹951 crore, Coempt Edutech around ₹384 crore. Lowest bidder wins, so rules were followed.

SARTHAK 🎯: My question is not whether CBSE followed the rules. My question is why CBSE changed the rules.

RAJDEEP: People say you are batting for the opposition.

SARTHAK 🔥: In a democracy, opposition parties are pressure groups. If someone supports me, I am thankful. If someone ignores me, I do not care.

[The Nalanda Index @Nalanda_index]

While many sit in air-conditioned offices and complain, railway workers spend hours under the blazing sun keeping the country moving.

The next time your train arrives safely and on time, remember the people sweating on the tracks to make it happen. Respect their hard work. 🚆☀️ #RailwayWorkers #UnsungHeroes

[Pete Oxenham @peteoxenham]

strava mcp launched today lfg

[Martinnn1899 @Martinnn1899]

Mira lo que está haciendo en Brasil nuestros 50 palos al mes

[Gabiola @gabiola442]

Meet Benny White: elite partying lore of this man:
—Chucked Ødegaard’s £1,200 glasses right into the crowd without a second thought.
—Bullied Rice into performing "Rice, Rice Baby."
—​Joyful sang "Hincapie, get your bumm out."
—Someone pelted a burger at the parade bus, and he genuinely just ate it.

​You actually cannot convince me there is a bigger legend in the game of partying than him. Ultimate GOAT behavior. 🐐🥳

[mama kutty @_ozy_mandias]

Two Tamil Footballers at the 2026 FIFA World Cup

[gunnerblog @gunnerblog]

🚨 Since his penalty miss in the #UCL final, Arsenal supporters have made Gabriel the top-selling shirt name at the club.

His printed name is up 350% since Saturday’s final. At one stage he was outselling any other name x2.

@TheAthleticFC 🔴⚪️🇧🇷❤️

https://t.co/6GyvOeOOH4

[The Touchline | 𝐓 @TouchlineX]

🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: Metropolitan Police confirms that Arsenal's parade is the biggest ever parade held in the country.

Over 1.5 million people estimated.

[Arsenal Buzz @ArsenalBuzzCom]

🎥| Ben White gets Declan Rice to sing ‘Rice Rice Baby’ 🤣 #afc

[वरुण 🇮🇳 @varungrover]

A 17-year old having more courage, skills, and love for the nation than many big news corporations and their multiple award winning journos combined.

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

MORE SHAME: now the WFI stops @Phogat_Vinesh from competing in the 53 kg category trials and tells her only this morning on the day of trials that she can compete only in 50 kg category! PURE VENDETTA being carried out against a world class athlete only because she took on the ‘ESTABLISHMENT’. Will anyone from GOI, sports ministry or our sporting fraternity speak up? No wonder we can never be a great Olympic nation: too much politics, too little sport.😡

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Magic hat 🎩 @themagic_tophat]

He’s simply a thug, just like his dad. Actual pros should not have to risk their safety playing against him.

[Yureed Elahi @yureedelahi]

Arsenal: PL Report 25/26
I worked on a team report alongside that Garner report.
Since this has taken a lot out of me, my brain needs a reset. I can't be touching anything data related for a while (except for my job🙁)
PDF here in case you prefer it:
https://t.co/FT2RQ5JwSO