Elderly candidate at a UK local election event in Bradford steps up to the mic He launches into a full speech in Hindi/Urdu while the crowd watches The guy literally doesn’t speak English You can’t make this up

8,000 Meta workers got fired by email this morning. Singapore got the notice at 4 AM. The moment the email arrived, their laptops, work email, and accounts went dark. That is how a $1.7 trillion company tells you it is over. Inside Meta, this round has a name. They are calling it "Pralaydin," which is Hindi for "day of catastrophe." Reuters reports this is the third firing round of 2026, and the full year could end with 22,000 people gone. About one in five Meta employees. Analysts at Evercore say firing these 8,000 people will save Meta around $3 billion a year. That sounds like a lot. Zuckerberg has been writing much bigger checks for AI hires. Last summer he paid an ex-Apple engineer named Ruoming Pang $200 million to come work on AI. He paid another AI researcher, Andrew Tulloch, a reported $1.5 billion over six years. He wrote a $14.3 billion check just to get the CEO of an AI startup called Scale to join the team. The same week Meta laid off 8,000 office workers, the company is still planning to spend somewhere between $125 and $145 billion this year on AI data centers and the chips to run them. The firings save about 2% of that. Two days before the layoffs began, Meta picked 7,000 of the survivors and moved them onto brand new AI teams. The people getting hit in this round are mostly engineers and product managers. Another wave is already planned for later this year. Meta is not in trouble. Far from it. The company made $56 billion in revenue in just the first three months of 2026. That was up 33% from a year ago. Pure profit in those same three months was nearly $27 billion. The stock is off its September high but Meta is still worth $1.7 trillion. The severance is good on paper. 16 weeks of base pay, plus two extra weeks for every year you put in, plus a year and a half of health insurance. The average payout works out to about $360,000 per person. The money does arrive. But finding a new job is brutal. Engineers who got cut in earlier Meta rounds say they have sent out hundreds of job applications and heard back from almost nobody, even with Meta on the resume. So a wildly profitable company is firing 8,000 office workers via 4 AM email and instant lockout, while writing checks worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a small group of new AI hires. The Singapore workers reading their termination email at 4 AM were paying for the next $200 million hire.

.@maitreya_wagh and @xan_ps watched voice AI demos work perfectly in labs, then break in Mumbai call centers: customers code-switching mid-sentence, connections dropping, reality exposing every edge case. They'd seen this pattern before—Maitreya shipping products at Datamuni and Bain, and Prateek scaling infrastructure at Zomato and Atlassian. So they built @bolna_dev to work in the complexity of enterprise environments. India runs on a billion business calls daily. Most are still manual, expensive, fragile. Bolna built an orchestration layer that lets enterprises deploy multilingual voice agents at scale, without vendor lock-in or brittle systems. Their platform already handles thousands of concurrent calls. Customer service reps now manage escalations while Bolna handles routine queries in Hindi, English, and Hinglish without dropping connections. We're backing Maitreya, Prateek, and the Bolna team from day one. More from @neerajarora, @yuris, @AkarshS27, and @SiddhantD06:

NTA Declares Result of NEET (UG) 2026 11.21 lakh candidates qualify; Results declared in time for counselling and Medical College Admissions; Toppers from almost all States and Union Territories; More than 58 per cent of qualified candidates are women; Examination conducted in 13 languages The National Testing Agency (NTA) declares the result of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate), NEET (UG) 2026. The result has been declared in time so that the medical-admission and counselling calendar for candidates stays on track. A total of close to 20 lakh candidates appeared for NEET (UG) 2026 at 5,440 centres in 551 cities in India and 14 cities abroad. 11.21 lakh candidates have qualified for admission to undergraduate medical, dental, AYUSH and allied programmes. Scorecards of all candidates are available on the official website, The full list of Top Rankers, State Toppers, category-wise toppers (SC, ST, OBC-NCL, Gen-EWS, PwBD and PwD), category-wise cut-off marks and language-wise participation is also being published on the NTA website. Overview of the Candidates who appeared in NEET UG Exam on 21st June 2026 Close to 20 lakh candidates appeared and 11.21 lakh qualified. Candidates appeared from every State and Union Territory of the country, in 13 languages. More than 58 per cent of the qualified candidates are women. The majority of the top-performing candidates are between 17 and 19 years of age. Profile of the Top Rankers 138 candidates scored above 690 marks out of 720. Of these: •Over 93 per cent appeared for NEET (UG) for the first time. •99 per cent are between 17 and 19 years of age. Geographical Distribution Qualified candidates have emerged from every one of the 36 States and Union Territories, ranging from over 1.7 lakh in Uttar Pradesh to 43 in Lakshadweep. State Toppers include Jigmet Yangchan Lamo (Ladakh, 530 marks), Dhruv Tripathi (Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 606 marks) and Fahmida Anees (Lakshadweep, 573 marks), and cover every North-Eastern State. 17 State Toppers scored 700 or above; 26 scored above 690. The 138 top rankers come from 66 cities across the country. The Top 17 rankers who scored more than 705 marks span eight States, namely Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. Score Distribution and Highest Scorers •19 candidates scored above 700 out of 720. •1,492 candidates scored 650 and above. •10,160 candidates scored 600 and above. •90,780 candidates scored 500 and above. The highest score of 715 out of 720 was obtained jointly by Aryan Gupta (Punjab) and Panshul Bansal (Haryana). Category-wise Qualified Candidates Registered, appeared and qualified figures are being published in full for General, Gen-EWS, OBC-NCL, SC, ST, PwBD, PwD and Third Gender candidates. Separate topper lists for each category are provided in the accompanying toppers document. Category-wise qualified candidates: •General: 2.91 lakh •OBC-NCL: 5.12 lakh •SC: 1.59 lakh •ST: 63,716 •Gen-EWS: 95,026 •PwBD: 3,666 •PwD: 303 Category-wise cut-off marks and percentiles are being published simultaneously. Participation and Qualification of Women Candidates More than 58 per cent of all qualified candidates are women. Women also qualified at a higher rate than men: 56.8 per cent of women who appeared qualified, as against 55.1 per cent of men. Languages of the Examination NEET (UG) 2026 was conducted in 13 languages: Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and English. Process and Timeline of Result Declaration The result was declared within time through re-engineering of the process, with stages designed to run in parallel rather than in sequence, and with the de-linking of OMR sheet challenge from answer key release. Each stage was completed in full and made available for candidate view: •Provisional answer key published on 25 June 2026; challenge window open from 25 to 28 June 2026. •Scanned OMR answer sheets and recorded responses displayed to candidates from 13 to 15 July 2026. •Final answer key published on 16 July 2026; result declared on 16 July 2026. Statutory FrameworkNTA conducts NEET (UG) under Section 14 of the NMC Act, 2019 and Section 14 of the NCISM Act, 2020, and for BHMS under the NCH, on the direction of the Hon’ble Supreme Court and with the approval of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of Education. NTA’s mandate is to conduct the examination, declare the result on eligibility criteria provided by NMC, and issue the All-India Rank. Merit lists, category lists, domicile determination and counselling are the remit of the admitting/State authorities. NTA has no role in these. NEET (UG) result data is also used for admission to (H) Nursing and to BVSc and AH under the 15% VCI quota. AACCC is the counselling authority for the All-India Quota in BAMS/BUMS/BSMS and BHMS. Counselling and Candidate Advisory Counselling for the All-India Quota in MBBS/BDS is conducted by the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC). State quotas are conducted by respective State authorities. Candidates should rely only on official websites: and State counselling portals. Candidates are cautioned against fraudulent calls, messages or websites offering admission, seat blocking or score improvement. NTA does not contact candidates seeking money or credentials. Suspicious communication may be reported at neetug2026@nta.ac.in or 011-40759000.

Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a criminal complaint with the Vietnamese authorities against Israeli reservist soldier Matan Giravi, who is currently in Vietnam, over his participation in the genocidal war on Gaza. Giravi served in Battalion 920 of the 769th Brigade in the Israeli occupation army. During his service in Gaza, he participated in widespread destruction of property and civilian infrastructure in Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps, as well as in the Shujaiya and Rimal neighborhoods of Gaza City. Giravi made public statements calling for no mercy to be shown to Palestinians in Gaza and advocating for their displacement, while also opposing the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.