Top Stories — Friday, April 24, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- ‘Didi vs. Modi’: A Test for the Hindu Right in India’s Bengali Heartland — nyt News
- Alibaba’s Qwen AI is coming to cars, allowing drivers order food and book hotels by voice — CNBC
- In Britain, 7 Unelected Lords Are Helping to Block an Assisted Dying Bill — nyt News
‘Didi vs. Modi’: A Test for the Hindu Right in India’s Bengali Heartland
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/24/2026, 9:39:51 AM
Anupreeta Das and Hari Kumar spoke to dozens of voters in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, and Kurseong, in the state’s hilly region, where Mr. Modi’s party has made significant inroads.
In India, the world’s largest democracy, a single misspelling from years ago can now threaten a person’s right to vote.
Mohammad Ali Halder, a 63-year-old garment manufacturer in West Bengal, found that out after receiving a worrying notice earlier this year, months before elections to select the state’s next government. The Election Commission of India informed him that his father’s name had been spelled differently in two sets of voter records, making it tough to verify Mr. Halder’s identity. He would not be able to cast his ballot until the matter was resolved.
Mr. Halder, who runs his own garment business in Kolkata, the capital, gathered documents to prove his citizenship — land records going back almost 100 years, his passport and other government-issued identity cards — and filed an appeal. But his name has not been restored, and voting has started.
“I feel like a living dead body,” said Mr. Halder, clutching a plastic bag stuffed with the documents.
Mr. Halder is one of roughly nine million voters, or more than 10 percent of the electorate in West Bengal, whose names have been deleted or cast as “doubtful” in a recent voter roll revision by India’s Election Commission. It is the most populous of the four Indian states and one union territory where voters go to the polls this month, with results expected May 4.
Many of those deleted were Muslims, and opposition parties have accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of abusing its power to disenfranchise Muslim voters. Mr. Modi heads a three-member committee that selects the chief of the commission.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Mr. Modi has long described Muslims as invaders who compromise its idea of a Hindu nation. By deleting Muslim names from the voter list, the party may raise its chances in a state that has India’s second-largest Muslim population, and which it has never won.
The issue has become a flashpoint in the battle between the Trinamool Congress, a grass-roots party whose leader Mamata Banerjee, 71, is running for her fourth term in office, and the B.J.P., led in West Bengal by Suvendu Adhikari, a former Trinamool member.
Ms. Banerjee, who has been the chief minister of West Bengal since 2011, is one of Mr. Modi’s fiercest critics and immovable foes. Her image as both accessible and protective has earned her the moniker “Didi,” or big sister.
Both the B.J.P. and the election commission have denied claims of manipulating the voter roll through its “special intensive revision,” which started last year in a dozen states and territories. The commission said it was necessary to remove the names of voters who have died, are duplicated or have left the state. The last such exercise happened in 2002.
The stakes are particularly high in West Bengal because the B.J.P. has been steadily making inroads. From winning only three of the 294 seats in the legislative assembly in 2016, it took 77 seats in the last election, in 2021. While many election analysts still expect Ms. Banerjee to win, they predict a smaller margin, and that Mr. Modi’s party could win more than 100 seats.
West Bengal is strategically important because the Siliguri Corridor, which shares borders with three countries and has China looming behind them, runs through the state. Sometimes called the “Chicken’s Neck” because it is around 13 miles wide at its narrowest, it is India’s only land route to its eight northeastern states, used for delivering civilian and army supplies to sensitive border regions.
The B.J.P.’s growing presence is a marker of the progress Mr. Modi and the Hindu right have made in their quest to dominate India. Their pitch that India can only be economically powerful if it places Hindus first at both the national and state level has resonated with many Bengalis. Hindus make up the majority of India’s population and Muslims around 15 percent.
Muslim voters tend to be loyal to Ms. Banerjee, an avowed secularist who is unflashy in her appearance but fiery in her missives against opponents. She also attracts many Hindu voters for whom the Bengali cultural identity trumps religion. Bengalis are proud of their rich intellectual heritage, having produced several Nobel laureates, including Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the Indian national anthem.
“To us, she is a candidate for all 294 seats,” said Arindam Duttaroy, a businessman who joined a door-to-door campaign by Trinamool candidate Debasish Kumar on a recent Sunday morning. Ms. Banerjee had put Bengal on the path to progress, Mr. Duttaroy said. “She is a street fighter, she speaks for the common people.”
Many voters told us they fear that a B.J.P. state government would erase the Bengali identity and language. They expressed concern that the B.J.P. would try to impose speaking Hindi or enforce vegetarianism in a region known for its love of fish and meat. (To allay such fears, a B.J.P. candidate recently campaigned in Kolkata with a fish in his hand.)
Workers from Ms. Banerjee’s party distributed “Didi vs. Modi” snakes-and-ladders boards with a cutout that could be shaped into a die. The biggest threat on the board was a two-headed snake with the faces of Mr. Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. Land on that square and the whole state would slide to the bottom, a party worker cheerfully explained.
But Ms. Banerjee’s governance has been uneven. While welfare programs that deliver cash to women have been popular, her government has been plagued by allegations of corruption. In one scandal, party officials were accused of selling teaching positions at government schools. Some voters said they were frustrated at the slow pace of job creation and worried about women’s safety after a female doctor was raped and murdered in 2024.
The B.J.P. has promised to double the cash handouts to women and made public safety a campaign issue: Ratna Debnath, the mother of the doctor, decided to run for office for the B.J.P., saying that not all the perpetrators had been brought to justice under Ms. Banerjee.
The B.J.P.’s emerging stronghold is in north Bengal, a hilly border region home to about a fifth of the state’s roughly 100 million people. The party holds 30 of the 54 assembly seats from the region’s eight districts. Voters here care less about religion and language. They want higher-paying jobs and better roads, and many accuse the Banerjee government of having overlooked their interests.
Reshma Mukhiya, who runs a small tea stall in Kurseong, a town on the way to Darjeeling, pointed to a potholed road that she said had not been repaired in months.
“In the last election, we supported Didi,” said Ms. Mukhiya, 40, who makes up to 20,000 rupees, or $214, a month from her shop, supplemented by the 1,500 rupees she receives from the welfare program for women. But the Trinamool does “little work,” she said. “There should be some change now.”
In these disaffected border areas, the B.J.P.’s promise to weed out “infiltrators” who compete for jobs has resonated. Mr. Shah, the home minister, has used the term to describe illegal immigrants from neighboring, Muslim-majority Bangladesh — long an issue in India, though formal estimates of their number are hard to come by.
Critics of the voter roll revision said it targets Muslim citizens of India by muddling the issues. The reasons officials have given for deleting names have been confusing to people with limited resources and time to prove their identities, said Farida Parvin, a councilor with the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and a Trinamool member. Muslims were deleted at higher rates than Hindus.
Tens of thousands of names were placed in “adjudication” for reasons ranging from a voter’s father being listed as female in 2002, or families with four children who now have six, Ms. Parvin said.
When SK Md. Amir, a 27-year-old homeopathic doctor, filled out his voter registration form earlier this year, he provided his father’s details, but he got a notice from the commission on April 6 that left him scratching his head. It said that the details linking him to the previous revision were that of his grandparents and there was an age discrepancy. “This means I have lost my voting right for now.”
Mr. Halder, the garment manufacturer in Kolkata, was told that his name and details were “incorrectly linked” because the spelling of his father’s name in the 2002 revision, “Rias,” did not match the name, “Riasuddin Halder,” which he put down in his application this year.
Sitting cross-legged on a bed in his family home in South 24 Parganas, a Muslim-majority district in Kolkata that has seen one of the highest deletions of voter names, Mr. Halder showed land records dating back to 1928. He said he was hoping to appeal the decision via special tribunals, except that one hadn’t been set up in his neighborhood yet.
He fretted that without his voter registration the bank might close his account, or the government shut his business.
“I fear my citizenship will be gone,” he said.
Chandrasekhar Bhattacharjee contributed reporting.
Anupreeta Das covers India and South Asia for The Times. She is based in New Delhi.
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Alibaba’s Qwen AI is coming to cars, allowing drivers order food and book hotels by voice
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/24/2026, 9:32:08 AM
BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Alibaba said Friday that its Qwen artificial intelligence model will be integrated into vehicles from automakers including BYD and a local joint venture of Volkswagen, as the industry pushes to add more in-car digital services and compete for buyers in a slowing electric vehicle market.
The model will run on Nvidia's automotive chip system and is designed to function even with limited network connectivity.
Alibaba said select models will allow drivers to order food delivery, book hotels, buy tickets to attractions and track packages, among other features, through voice commands.
The system combines on-device processing with cloud-based computing to interpret voice commands, plan multi-step tasks and connect to services such as payments and navigation.
Auto companies that will integrate Qwen into their vehicle systems include BYD, Geely, Li Auto, Changan, Dongfeng, BAIC, Great Wall Motor, SAIC Volkswagen and SAIC IM Motors.
The announcement was made on the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show 2026.
Earlier this year, FAW Group's Hongqi brand integrated Qwen into its in-car system, debuting in the Hongqi HS6 plug-in hybrid model.
The rollout comes as Chinese automakers compete to attract buyers in a slowing electric-car market and seek to differentiate through in-car software and services.
A local version of Audi in China, which replaces its four-ring logo with a wordmark, said its second model — an electric SUV called the E7X — will begin presales on May 8. The vehicle will incorporate AI features from ByteDance's Doubao and iFlyTek, Audi said at the auto show.
It was not immediately clear whether the AI features would be available in cars exported outside China.
Cadillac, the American luxury vehicle division of General Motors, also showed off a new model with voice-assistant capabilities that can connect with ByteDance's Doubao AI.
In Britain, 7 Unelected Lords Are Helping to Block an Assisted Dying Bill
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/24/2026, 9:31:07 AM
Six hundred and eighty-eight.
That is the number of amendments that just seven members of Britain’s House of Lords have proposed to a bill that was meant to legalize assisted dying for the terminally ill.
So many amendments have been lodged — more than 1,280 in total — that the bill now seems doomed to fail, in a rare example of the Lords, Parliament’s unelected second chamber, blocking a bill approved by the House of Commons.
Critics say that if that happens, it would threaten the credibility of an institution that much of the British public already considers bloated and undemocratic, according to opinion polls. Surveys also show that a consistent majority of Britons think assisted dying should be allowed in cases where someone is dying from an incurable illness.
“It is a giant filibuster,” said Charles Falconer, a former Labour Party minister and a leading proponent of the bill in the Lords. It is “absolutely infuriating,” he added. “If all the Lords does is talk and come to no conclusions, which is what’s happening here, then what’s the point of the Lords?”
The House of Commons voted in a landmark decision in 2024 to allow assisted dying for some terminally ill, mentally competent adults.
The bill, which was scrutinized and amended in the months after, includes strict conditions. Only people who are over 18, and who have been given fewer than six months to live, would be eligible. Two doctors and a specialist panel would have to approve the decision, and patients would have to administer the lethal substance themselves.
Opponents in the Lords argue that the bill is poorly drafted and does not contain enough safeguards to protect vulnerable people from possibly being pressured into an assisted death. They have pointed to reservations expressed by some medical organizations, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists. Proposing changes is their job, they say.
Given the lack of time now left on the parliamentary calendar, Mr. Falconer acknowledged that the bill is “not going to go through all its stages.”
With its ornate, gilded chamber and archaic rules, the House of Lords scrutinizes, amends and often improves bills. But under Britain’s unwritten constitutional arrangements, it generally does not veto legislation and instead bows to the will of the country’s 650 elected members of the House of Commons.
The bill’s opponents know that the parliamentary gridlock has prompted questions about the role of the Lords. “I think that’s meant to encourage us to change our minds,” said Tanni Grey-Thompson, a Paralympic gold medalist, disability rights campaigner and one of the top seven amenders to the bill in the Lords, who have proposed more than half of the total amendments between them. “And it’s not working.”
She conceded that some amendments — including one she had proposed requiring that anyone seeking an assisted death provide “a negative pregnancy test” — could have been better drafted. Critics have pointed out that this would not be relevant for men, older women or people who can’t have children, but she said she wanted to address how to support terminally ill pregnant women.
Ms. Grey-Thompson, who has proposed a total of 130 amendments to the bill, rejected accusations of filibustering. She said that the bill leaves out vital detail and said she was determined to prevent disabled people being pressured into ending their lives. Coercion could, she said, be “very gentle” for disabled people who “are quite often made to feel they have no value to society anyway.”
Other opponents to the bill include those who believe palliative care should be improved to ensure terminally ill people have a real choice, and those who oppose assisted dying for religious reasons. A number of the 26 Church of England bishops who have an automatic right to sit in the House of Lords have expressed reservations.
Humanists U.K., a group that supports the legislation and has been tracking its progress, said the impasse reflects the fact that procedures in the Lords allow a small number of members “who are vehemently opposed to the bill to block its passage.”
Some experts believe that the problems arose because the legislation was drafted not by the government but by a lawmaker in the Commons, Kim Leadbeater, who won a ballot for non-government legislators to propose what is known as a Private Members’ Bill on a topic of their choosing. These lawmakers do not have the power to set up inquiries to consult the general public about potential changes of the law, which could have helped bolster the case for the bill.
By contrast, there was wide consultation on similar legislation passed in Jersey, an island in the English Channel that makes its own laws, said Rebecca McKee, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank.
Assisted dying was discussed by a “citizens jury” there before a bill went to Jersey’s legislators who “had a much better idea of what the public wanted” in terms of safeguards and trade-offs, Ms. McKee said. There was nothing similar before the legislation covering England and Wales went to Parliament, Ms. McKee added, and “not being a government bill, it didn’t have the pre-legislative legwork that I think something like this does need.”
A key question is what happens if, as expected, the bill fails.
It could be forced through under a procedure allowing the Commons — by voting a second time — to overrule the Lords. To do that the legislation could be reintroduced as a Private Members’ Bill in the next session. However, for that to happen, another lawmaker who supports assisted dying would have to come close to the top of the next ballot to propose a second Private Members’ Bill on the matter — by no means guaranteed.
Alternatively, the government could allot time for the bill in the next session, which begins in May. Ms. McKee believes, however, that this is unlikely because the cabinet is split on the issue of assisted dying (elected lawmakers were allowed to vote according to their conscience in the Commons rather than being obliged to follow a party line).
Mr. Falconer said the battle over the bill is not over. “Its drive is coming from people who have experience of the horrors that terminal illness can involve,” he said. “Although one should do everything one can to try to improve palliative care, for a group of people — no matter how good the palliative care is — that last period is not nice.”
In the meantime, in addition to the legislation passed in Jersey, there was a vote in favor of assisted dying in the Isle of Man, a crown dependency in the Irish Sea. Scotland’s Parliament, however, recently rejected a plan.
Ms. Grey-Thompson is undeterred by the criticism. But she acknowledged that the Lords had pushed itself into the unfamiliar glare of public scrutiny.
“Most people,” she said, “don’t pay much attention to us until we either do something they like — or hate.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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