1.Narendra Modi secures allies’ backing for new government after India election setback

Narendra Modi has won the formal backing of allies of his Bharatiya Janata party to form a government after the BJP lost its outright majority in India’s general election. Leaders of the National Democratic Alliance unanimously elected Modi as their leader on Wednesday afternoon in Delhi.

The prime minister had earlier met President Droupadi Murmu to tender his resignation ahead of the swearing in of a new BJP-led government, expected on Saturday. Modi needed the support of NDA allies after election results on Tuesday showed the BJP had lost its outright majority in parliament, the prime minister’s biggest political setback in a decade of power.

Stock markets in India rose on Wednesday after sharply selling off the day before in response to the split election result, which augured a less stable political landscape for Modi’s third five-year term. The Nifty 50 index of India’s top stocks closed up 3.4 cent having dropped 5.9 per cent on Tuesday, mirroring moves by the BSE Sensex benchmark index.

TDP leader N Chandrababu Naidu, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, LJP(R) leader Chirag Paswan, JD(S) leader H D Kumarawamy, Jana Sena's Pawan Kalyan, AGP's Atul Bora and NCP's Praful Patel were among the 21 leaders from 16 parties who attended the meeting besides Modi and BJP's Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and J P Nadda.
 

Janata Dal (United) leader Sanjay Jha, who was present in the meeting, said the formalities related to the formation of the government at the Centre under Modi are expected to be over soon.

2.Artificial intelligence workers warned that the industry is stifling concern over the safety of AI. 

Thirteen current and former staffers, including 11 from OpenAI, signed an open letter, endorsed by the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, saying whistleblower protections are insufficient and confidentiality agreements “block us from voicing out concerns” on issues including the possibility of human extinction.

Vox recently revealed that OpenAI staff were threatened with the loss of equity if they didn’t sign restrictive agreements upon leaving. And one OpenAI worker who worked on the safety of potentially super-intelligent systems said he was fired for raising concerns about security, arguing that protections against foreign actors stealing key secrets was “egregiously insufficient.”

3.Glasses coated in lithium could let us see in the dark

Glasses coated in a lithium compound could one day allow wearers to see clearly in the dark.

For more than a decade, researchers have been searching for the best lightweight material that can convert infrared light, which the human eye cannot see, into visible light. The idea is to replace night vision goggles, which are often heavy and cumbersome.

Until recently, the main candidate was gallium arsenide. Now, Laura Valencia Molina at the Australian National University in Canberra and her colleagues have discovered that a film made of lithium niobate, coated with silicon dioxide gratings, performs better.

4.A growing number of the internet’s webpages are disappearing, particularly in China reports New York Times.

 The country is known for its vast censorship regime — deployed most recently during yesterday’s anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown — but its broader internet is itself shrinking : Huge numbers of Chinese blogs, social-media posts, and outlets that operated in the decade to 2005 have vanished.

The overall number of websites has also declined a third between 2017 and 2023, and, despite a growing online population, the number of Chinese-language sites has fallen as a proportion of the global internet, The New York Times’ China business columnist wrote. The problem is a global one: 38% of websites that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible, according to Pew Research.

5.The Chinese city of Guangzhou is putting $1.4 billion toward the development of flying cars, dubbed the “low-altitude economy”

The investment reflects the government’s belief that piloted and autonomous civilian aircraft could serve as a growth engine to help reverse a sluggish economy, Nikkei reported. While regulatory hurdles remain, China has loosened some restrictions on the nascent industry and plans to put the new money toward building takeoff and landing points for the craft. Guangzhou makes sense as the place to start: It’s home to two prominent flying car companies, and is located in the same province as Shenzhen, a major tech hub.

6.Investors pull cash from ESG funds as performance lags

Global investors are turning their backs on sustainably focused stock funds, as poor performance, a series of scandals and attacks from US Republicans hit enthusiasm for a much-hyped sector that has pulled in trillions of dollars of assets.

Clients have withdrawn a net $40bn from environmental, social and governance (ESG) equity funds so far this year, according to research from Barclays, the first year that flows have trended negative. Redemptions, which include a record monthly net outflow of about $14bn in April, have been widespread across all main regions.

The outflows mark a significant reversal for a sector that investors have flocked to in recent years, attracted by the claim that such funds could help change the world for the better while also making as much — or even more — money as traditional stock portfolios.

Pierre Ives-Gauthier, head of strategy and co-founder at AlphaValue, a Paris-based independent research company, compared the sector to the tech bubble that burst in 2000. “ESG was a dot-com sort of hype 20 years later and now it has passed,” he said.

Many funds have been hit by the poor performance of sectors such as clean energy, while they have also missed out on strong returns from fossil fuel companies that they actively avoided.

Scandals such as one at German asset manager DWS — which agreed to pay $19mn to the US securities regulator in a greenwashing probe after being accused of making “materially misleading statements” — have also hit appetite for the sector.