Reliance Buys Mid-East Crude as Trump Pressure on Russian Oil Grows; India has ‘a Lot to do’ to Stop Sale of Toxic Cough Syrup; Govt. Proposes New Rules on AI-Generated Content

What the Entry of Foreign Universities Into India can do to Education, Sonam Wangchuk's Wife Claims Govt Monitoring Her Movements, Mehul Choksi's Appeal Against Extradition Rejected in Antwerp

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

October 22, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

In the last 24 hours, United States president Donald Trump has repeated his claim of de-escalating India-Pakistan tensions in May and said that he had a conversation on trade and “no wars with Pakistan” with prime minister Narendra Modi. Trump also repeated the claim that India was not going to be buying “much Russian oil” now – a line that India has been careful about. “He’s not going to buy much oil from Russia,” the US president said. “He wants to see that war end as much as I do.” Modi, on his part, neither acknowledged the bit about trade, nor the mention of wars. He instead thanked Trump for his Diwali wishes and said the two countries were united in fighting terrorism in all forms.

As US pressure on India grows to reduce and even stop procurement of Russian oil, Indian refiners are seeking other suppliers. India’s Reliance Industries moved to buy crude from the Middle East and may place more orders, reported Bloomberg. “The privately-held refiner bought at least 2.5 million barrels, including Iraq’s Basrah Medium, as well as Al-Shaheen and Qatar Land” Bloomberg said, quoting unnamed traders.

AQI levels in Delhi on Diwali night breached permissible limits for particulate matter concentration by 15 to 18 times across a number of monitoring stations. But various stations did not show any readings between 11 pm and 5 am, which could be due to instruments being saturated by very high particulate matter levels, Sophiya Mathew reports. She quotes former Delhi pollution control committee chairman Mohan George as saying: “Many stations have data missing from 11 pm to 6 am … If this was a ‘Green Diwali’, then the public deserves to know what exactly they breathed during the night.”

A World Health Organisation (WHO) official has warned that India still has “a lot to do” to stop the sale of toxic cough syrups, saying regulatory gaps continue to put Indian children at risk despite progress since the deaths of dozens of children abroad linked to India-made medicines. “They have made some strides,” Rutendo Kuwana, the WHO official who leads the team for incidents involving substandard and falsified medicines, told Reuters. The news agency reported that he was referring to the new Indian rule requiring medicine to be tested for contaminants like ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol before export.

The electronics and IT ministry today proposed new rules to regulate AI-generated content, in which AI and social media firms would be required to label such media in a way that covers at least 10% of its surface area or that spans the initial 10% of an audio clip. Social media companies will also need to get users to declare whether something they upload is AI-generated or not, as well as put reasonable checks and balances in place. These measures, the ministry said, are in light of the growing potential AI tools have to “cause user harm, spread misinformation, manipulate elections or impersonate individuals”. Incidentally the IT minister’s own party just a month ago released an AI-generated video that openly vilified Bengali-speaking Muslims ahead of the Assam elections.

In a complaint before the Supreme Court Gitanjali Angmo has said that the government is keeping a close watch on her movements and her conversations with her jailed husband Sonam Wangchuk, thereby violating