What does the Indian education minister’s resignation mean for PM Modi? | Reuters World News

Hi, I'm Mindy Burrows in London. It's Saturday, July 25th. Today, India's education minister resigns after mounting youth-led protests. Trump mixes jokes and jabs at a rescheduled press freedom dinner. Fresh questions for open AI over its rogue agent's hacking spree. And LeBron James heads to Philadelphia for a record 24th NBA season. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, 7 days a week. In India, protesters celebrate after the resignation of the country's education minister. Supporters of the youth-led cockroach junta party have been protesting all week, demanding that Dharmendra Pradhan quit to take responsibility for exam paper leaks. And South Asia chief correspondent Aftab Ahmed in New Delhi says it's caught the government off guard. This government has seen in the past they have been able to manage very long protests without relenting to the protesters' demands. So they were surprised by the scale of it. They were surprised by how openly people criticized the prime minister, without thinking twice. They were surprised that even after the administration got aggressive, they did not relent. The crowd swell continued to increase. We haven't seen Prime Minister Narendra Modi bending like this so quickly ever in the past. I mean, this has never happened. Even if he had to make a change, he would cover it up with, say, doing a whole cabinet reshuffle or things like that. He would never go out and say that this is a demand and I'm ready to fulfil your demand. So he was completely caught off guard. He was nervous. The entire government was nervous. The kind of things that we haven't seen in the past 12 years of Modi's rule. Aftab says despite their success here, it doesn't necessarily mean the CJP will form a real political party. It's hard to say where the cockroach junta party would go, right? And it's hard to imagine a serious party at a national level or a state level named as cockroach junta party. But what we can say is that some of the members of the cockroach junta party will surface at some political level because they are now seeing that they can make the change. It has given this generation sort of the confidence that they did not have. And it will not be surprising if some of these people turn out to be people that sort of break up the old politics and try to start ushering a new era of politics. But it is hard to say. US President Donald Trump took the stage last night at the rescheduled White House Correspondents Association dinner, using a speech at the annual press freedom event to mix jokes with the criticism of journalists, political rivals and celebrities. Trump also joked about serving a fourth term before pulling out a red Trump 2028 hat. I won three times. Now I'm going to do it again. Thank you. I'm going to do it. It should be easy. I'm getting very good at running for president. The gathering was moved to a smaller venue and held under heightened security after a gunman disrupted the original event in April. Democrats in the state of Maine are meeting today to pick a new candidate for US Senate, and they seem to be rallying around state lawmaker Troy Jackson. His nomination will cap a whirlwind few weeks for Democrats in the Senate. Their original nominee, Graham Plattner, was forced out of the race after facing sexual assault allegations. And as politics editor Michael Learmonth explains, Jackson has been around state politics for longer than Plattner, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's widely known. He is very much, I think, considered like-minded and perhaps the heir to Plattner's movement. You know, Bernie Sanders endorsed Jackson just like he did Plattner. He doesn't have the charisma as Plattner, few people do, but he does have a lot of the same kind of characteristics that made Plattner popular in terms of he's a working class guy. You know, he came from not kind of an elite background and he feels like a Mainer, right? It does feel a little backroom-y in the way it kind of all went down. You know, I think that if you hear any critiques of it this week, it'll probably be from Democrats who said, I didn't get a chance to be heard because all this got decided really quickly. There's still, as we're finding out, still not a ton known about Troy Jackson. This whole real-time vetting is going to happen over the next few weeks. And, you know, it's like nail-biting time for Democrats, really. All week, we've been tracking this story of a rogue open AI agent that escaped its confines during a test and then hacked AI startup Hugging Face. Well, New Reuters reporting shows that little AI escapade was a bit longer than we realised. Cybersecurity correspondent Raphael Sater has the story. We didn't know much about how long this hacking spree took, right? The initial thought that we got from Hugging Face and from OpenAI was that there was an autonomous agent that was mucking about in Hugging Face's internal network for a couple of days. What our sources have now told us is that this rogue AI agent was loose for four full days, at the very least. We don't know why OpenAI didn't see this right away. This was an agent that was meant to be operating in a sandbox, that is to say, an isolated environment. About a week after the hack took place, OpenAI did become aware of it. But that was only after Hugging Face went public with a blog post saying that they'd been targeted by a very advanced model, and after the FBI got involved. Raphael says having an advanced model like this on the loose, even for a few hours, would be a concern. And the escape highlights security risks for this technology. But, he says, this is not just about OpenAI. There's a fair bit of concern over the security culture at OpenAI. But several experts have told us that it's a mistake to focus just on one AI company. You have at least, depending on how you count them, between half a dozen to a dozen, state-of-the-art AI frontier companies that are jostling to release the biggest, the best, the fastest, the highest performing models. And in that atmosphere of intense competition, there is the fear that safety concerns are being shoved aside just to get things out as quick as possible. In a statement, OpenAI called the hack unprecedented and said it was reviewing the incident. A spokesperson said there were several inaccuracies in Reuters' reporting, but didn't respond when asked to describe them. The FBI declined to comment about the incident. In Europe, massive wildfires are forcing tens of thousands to evacuate across southwest France and Spain. Firefighters battle a huge blaze in France's Cap Verre Peninsula, a tourist hotspot. Authorities have ordered a total evacuation of the area. Meanwhile, the Spanish government has declared a national emergency over wildfires near Madrid and the neighbouring province of Avila, forcing thousands to evacuate. On this week's On Assignment, Christopher Wall Jesper speaks with photojournalist Mike Blake about what it's like to cover such brutal wildfires. You get a few pictures and then, OK, I got to get back to my car to file these. Get back to my car and I'm like, I need to move my car because my car is going to be on fire in like 10 minutes. We'll put a link in the podcast description. LeBron James is going to Philadelphia. The 41-year-old announced on Friday he's joining the 76ers for what will be a record 24th NBA season. He's leaving the Lakers after eight years to chase one more championship, signing a two-year deal worth just $8 million, a fraction of what he could command, says sports reporter Frank Pingue. The 76ers are getting a discount here for sure. LeBron is definitely taking a pay cut. To him, the logic is if he takes as much as he is worth or what he deems himself worth, it's not going to leave the team much financial flexibility in terms of routing out the roster. This allows him to join a team that already has some star players in place and they can be competitive right from the tip off of the season. He may be 41, but he is still playing at a very high level and most any team in the NBA would be thrilled to have him on their roster. When he's on the floor, he commands attention. He might not be in the prime of his career, but he is still a threat out there without a doubt. He's going to make an impact in Philadelphia for sure. Paramount Skydance has agreed to hit pause on its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, while a federal judge weighs whether the deal creates an illegal media monopoly. The delay could cost the company around $7 million a day in fees if the merger doesn't close by its September 30th deadline. California and 11 other states sued earlier this month, arguing the deal would give the combined company too much power to raise prices on film and TV. For more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. If you're listening on a smart speaker, just ask for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.