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A bird flu warning sign and quarantine zone in Switzerland.
Hard Numbers: Bird flu spreads, Modi joins Truth Social, Trans-Niger Pipeline explodes, JFK files released, Majority of Americans oppose tariffs, Who thinks Trump is a dictator?
166 million: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is concerned over the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus to mammal species, including zoo animals, pets, and cattle, which is causing havoc in agriculture and increasing the likelihood it could jump to humans. The spread among birds has already caused the culling of at least 166 million chickens in the United States, sending egg prices soaring.
31,600: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modijoined Truth Social, the social media platform owned by US President Donald Trump. In his inaugural post on Monday, Modi shared a photo with Trump taken in 2019 in Houston, Texas, and as of Wednesday morning, he had 31,600 followers.
450,000: An explosion occurred Monday night on the Trans-Niger Pipeline in Rivers State's Bodo community, threatening over 450,000 barrels of daily crude oil production and causing a fire to rage through a local mangrove. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incident, and an investigation is underway. The pipeline has been the subject of terror attacks before, but no such link has yet been established.
80,000: Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. President Donald Trump on Tuesday released approximately 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. While White House Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields claimed that Americans “are truly going to be shocked,” historians do not expect significant new revelations.
38: The latest exclusive GZERO-Echelon poll shows that 54% of American voters oppose US President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, while 38% support them. Republicans favor them by a 47-point margin, but Independents and Democrats oppose them by margins of 30 and 76, respectively.
36: The same poll asked respondents which of a list of world leaders they would consider to be a dictator. North Korean President Kim Jong Un topped the list at 77%, followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin at 75%, and then by US President Donald Trump, at 36%.President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands as they attend a joint press conference at the White House in Washington, DC, on Feb. 13, 2025.
Trump imposes tariffs, Modi brings gifts
As promised, US President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on all American trading partners Thursday afternoon. Each country will be assessed individually, factoring in value-added taxes, foreign tariff rates, industry subsidies, regulations, and currency undervaluation to determine customized duty rates. Trump claimed, “It’s gonna make our country a fortune.”
The tariff review will be completed within weeks or months and could kick-start bilateral negotiations with other countries. Trump took the occasion to reiterate that Canada should become a 51st state, chastising it for not meeting NATO spending thresholds and repeating his false claim that the US “subsidizes” Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year.
Then there’s India. Trump’s proclamation came ahead of his meeting with “total killer” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House. Modi reportedly arrived bearing a “gift”: tariff reductions on India’s imports of US electronics, medical equipment, and chemicals, as well as commitments to purchase American liquefied natural gas and defense equipment.
What else does Trump want from Delhi? Trump wants to reduce the US trade deficit with India, $45.6 billion in 2024. The average US tariff rate on Indian imports is currently 2.2%, while India’s is 12% on US goods. Trump also wants India to reduce the emigration of its citizens to the US – both H-1B visa-holders working in the tech industry and undocumented migrants. India is the third largest source of undocumented immigrants in the US.
On Thursday, Trump said he would match India’s tariffs. “We are being reciprocal with India … Whatever India charges, we charge them.”
Both men agreed on Thursday to begin talks on an early trade deal to resolve the tariff standoff. Modi said he would buy more US oil, gas, and military equipment while fighting illegal immigration, and Trump said the US would ultimately sell F-35 stealth fighters to India.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans to attend the Super Bowl, on Feb. 9, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Trump to unveil steel tariffs, Paris AI summit begins, Ecuador faces runoff election, Maoist rebels killed, Baltics energized by Europe, Eagles soar over Chiefs
25: Donald Trump says he plans to announce a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports from all countries, including Mexico and Canada. It’s unclear when the tariffs will take effect, but the US president said Sunday that he would make a formal announcement on Monday.
80: Government and industry leaders from at least 80 countries are convening in Paris on Monday and Tuesday as the AI Action Summit gets underway inside the historic Grand Palais. This year’s summit, the third following similar gatherings in Bletchley Park (UK) and Seoul, Korea, is co-hosted by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi,and it will feature an open dialogue about AI regulation and innovation at a critical time for both geopolitics and the technology itself. US Vice President JD Vance is attending as he begins his first official trip abroad. GZERO’s Tony Maciulis will be reporting from the summit and bringing us an interview with Paris Peace Forum Director General Justin Vaïsse on Tuesday.
1: Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa was expected to prevail in Sunday’s election and avoid a runoff, but the race against his leftist opponent, Luisa Gonzalez, proved extremely close. Up less than 1% at the time of writing, and with nearly 80% of the ballot boxes counted, Noboa had 44.5% of the vote compared to Gonzalez's 44.1%. If neither candidate secures an outright majority, a runoff will be held on April 13.
31: Security forces battled Maoist rebels in the Bijapur district of Chattisgarh in central India on Sunday, killing 31 insurgents. The left-wing communists, part of the Naxalite movement, have been fighting with India’s government since 1967. Two Indian commandos were also killed in the clash.
3: The three Baltic countries have bid farewell to Russia’s power grid. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania completed their switch from the Russian to the European grid on Sunday. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the move — amid heightened security owing to suspected sabotage of underwater cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea — a new era of freedom for the region.
40-22: The Kansas City Chiefs were hoping for a historic hat-trick Super Bowl win last night in New Orleans, but it wasn’t to be. The Philadelphia Eagles dominated from the start, closing out the first half at 24-0, and finishing the game 40-22, with their quarterback, Jalen Hurts, winning MVP.
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan pauses as he speaks with Reuters during an interview, in Lahore, Pakistan in March 2023.
Hard Numbers: Pakistan indicts Imran Khan (again), RFK wants polio vaccine revoked, India eyes one election, Australia charges big tech, Zuckerberg and Bezos make YUGE donations
200: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, were indicted on Thursday on charges of unlawfully selling state gifts, including jewelry, at undervalued prices. They pleaded not guilty the same day, calling the charges politically motivated amid nearly 200 cases Khan has faced since his 2022 ouster. Khan and Bibi received 14-year sentences before this year’s election, but those terms were suspended on appeal following a prior three-year sentence in a related case.
14: A lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's pick to helm the Department of Health and Human Services, has filed a petition to pause the distribution of 14 vaccines – including polo, hepatitis A, and other deadly diseases. The petition also asks the agency to revoke its polio vaccine approval and end COVID-19 vaccine mandates around the country.
1: India’s cabinet has approved legislation for simultaneous national and state elections, the first step in advancing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “One Nation One Election” plan. Supporters say it would put a stop to India’s state of “perpetual elections,” but critics argue it would favor the national ruling party, Modi’s BJP, in local races.
160,000,000: In its latest crackdown on Big Tech, Australia will charge social media giants like Meta and Google millions if they don’t pay local media for news content. All platforms with revenue over AU$160 million will be obliged to pay up, but charges will be offset by any commercial agreements voluntarily struck between the platforms and news media businesses.
1,000,000: Nothing says sorry quite like cold hard cash. Meta announced on Wednesday that it's donating $1 million to the inaugural fund of President-elect Donald Trump, and Amazon.com, not to be outdone, plans to do the same. The moves appear to be fence-mending gestures – or, as critics call them, attempts to curry favor. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's relationship with the president-elect soured after Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 for his praise of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, and Trump has been critical of Jeff Bezos for owning the Washington Post -- and the newspaper's political coverage.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives to address the media ahead of the commencement of the Winter Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, on Monday, Nov. 25.
Modi’s party posts landslide election victories
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party scored a big political win over the weekend. After losing its parliamentary majority in national elections in June, the BJP posted a landslide victory in a state election inMaharashtra, India’s wealthiest state and home to Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. The BJP ran in this election as the head of an alliance that includes two smaller parties.
This victory in India’s second most populous state, combined with a victory last month in the northern state of Haryana, will reduce the reliance of Modi’s BJP on unpredictable allies to move legislation forward at the national level.
Modi also notched a political victory by holding peaceful elections in the violence-plagued territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Though his party didn’t win there, the elections themselves helped to legitimize Modi’s 2019 controversial decision to downgrade the troubled province’s status from state to “union territory,” a move that revoked its previous autonomy and allowed for it to be ruled directly from Delhi.
How did Modi’s BJP-led alliance win big in a year that has seen incumbent parties take political losses in South Africa, France, the UK, Japan, the US, and India itself? In part, the win was secured with cash payments and increased subsidies from the government, politically motivated decisions that will threaten the longer-term fiscal health of these states.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then-US President Donald Trumpshake hands before a meeting at Hyderabad House in Delhi, India, on Feb. 25, 2020.
India hopes Trump will lean its way
Last month, the Trudeau government expelled Indian diplomats after revealing allegations of assassination plots that Canadian officials linked to the highest levels of the Indian government. India denies the allegations and complains bitterly about a lack of security cooperation in dealing with what it sees as threats from Canadian Sikhs who are seeking an independent homeland in India.
On Wednesday, Canadian police confirmed that last month they arrested a man India calls a terrorist on gun charges.
The hostility between Canadian Sikhs and Hindus turned violent in the suburban Toronto community of Brampton earlier this month, leading to an angry denunciation from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India is now hoping Modi’s friend Trump will put Trudeau in his place and resolve the impasse in India’s favor.
But there is an active US prosecution of an Indian intelligence official over a plot to kill Sikh activists in both Canada and the United States. Trump is unlikely to turn a blind eye to that, says Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security.
“Anyone who is looking for a foothold to do foreign interference that involves violence on citizens of a country on that country’s soil should be deterred strongly by the United States, particularly under Trump,” she says. “He is strong on national security, and he is not going to tolerate murder-for-hire plots on American soil.”
On the other hand, Trump tends to be motivated by transactional concerns, and India has a lot of leverage in the global chess match between China and the United States.
Canadians manage to give Modi a headache for a change
For years, Justin Trudeau’s government failed to manage foreign interference in Canadian politics, with officials struggling to explain how they failed to see or act on intelligence reports. It got so bad that frustrated Canadian spies started leaking damaging tidbits, forcing the prime minister to call a public inquiry.
Canada has one of the world’s highest proportions of foreign-born citizens, which leads to lively grassroots diaspora politics, but it has failed to set up adequate protections against outside influence. It is only now setting up a foreign agent registry, for example, and the gaps appear to have been taken advantage of by foreign powers, particularly China and India.
Trudeau has been accused of turning a blind eye to Chinese interference and being too close to separatist Canadian Sikhs, while his Conservative opponents are accused of being too close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Trudeau and his officials have been on the defensive for years, struggling to explain their inadequate measures while trying to rectify them. But on Monday, his team showed a sign of progress as it took a series of carefully orchestrated steps designed to push back at Modi.
First, Canada announced it had expelled six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma. In New Delhi, after being summoned by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Canadian Deputy High Commissioner Stewart Wheelertold Indian journalists that Canada had provided “credible, irrefutable evidence of ties between agents of the government of India and the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.”
Next, senior Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers said they had “evidence pertaining to agents of the government of India’s involvement in serious criminal activity in Canada,” including “well over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life.”
Then, a steely-eyed Trudeau held a news conference outlining the allegations and complaining that India had failed to cooperate with Canadian police and public safety officials. “We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil,” Trudeau said.
Finally, officials worked the phones, giving off-the-record details to national security reporters in Ottawa and Washington, adding lurid details to the broad picture already laid out by the police and politicians.
Speaking off the record, Canadian officials told journalists that Indian diplomats have been forcing Indian Canadians to spy on one another, using money, visas, and threats for leverage, then sending the information back to India, where a senior official “authorized the intelligence-gathering missions and attacks” on people Modi wanted to be targeted. An unnamed Canadian official told the Washington Post that the senior official in India was Amit Shah, Modi’s right-hand man.
India denounced the “preposterous imputations” and blamed “vote bank politics,” Indian shorthand for Trudeau’s reliance on Sikh Canadian voters. India has often accused Canada of being soft on Sikh separatists, alleging that it harbors terrorists, blaming the Canadians for ignoring Indian warnings that might have prevented the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people.
On their face, the Canadian allegations seem too outlandish to be true. Officials allege that the attacks in Canada were carried out by thugs controlled by famous gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, who is directing assassins on behalf of his masters in the Modi government even while he sits in a Punjab prison cell. The targets include supporters of an independent Khalistan and other people who have gotten on the wrong side of Modi.
India has been demanding evidence of criminality since September 2023, when Trudeau accused Modi of being behind the murder of Canadian Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down by a hit squad outside a temple in British Columbia that June. Back then, India scoffed and falsely accused Trudeau of being coked up, acting as though Canada was making up lies.
Going to see Uncle Sam
But last November, an indictment was unsealed in New York that revealed Indian national Nikhil Gupta, acting on behalf of Modi’s government, had allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill Nijjar’s lawyer, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. India’s bumbling 007s made two big mistakes. Pannum is an American citizen, so the Americans could hardly let that slide. And the hitman Gupta tried to hire was actually an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency officer.
Gupta is now in a US prison, and officials in Canada and the police must now have a thick dossier linking India to other assassination attempts, including that of Nijjar.
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a lecturer at Yale University, says Modi can’t afford to be seen to have angered Uncle Sam.
“There will hardly be any damaging political consequences for Mr. Modi unless the United States decides to pursue its case very very strongly and embarrass India,” says Singh.
“Then it would make a material difference to how Mr. Modi is perceived.”
Trudeau showed his cards just as Indian officials were arriving in Washington this week to help the Americans with their inquiries in the Gupta case, maximizing the impact and embarrassing Modi on the world stage.
One of the most surprising things about the whole affair is that India seemingly did not dial down its activities after Trudeau called them out last year: Canadians allege that a recent attack against a popular singer was linked to Indian intelligence.
What does this mean for Modi?
So far, it’s a murky, inconclusive mess. The Canadians, of course, have proved nothing, and Trudeau’s back is to the wall as he’s facing growing pressure at home to step down as Liberal Party leader. In testimony at the inquiry on Wednesday, he went after his Conservative opponents, linking them to foreign interference, which lends credence to Indian allegations that he is just trying to save his own skin.
But allies have not expressed skepticism about the evidence the Canadians have shared. The US State Department seems unimpressed by India’s failure to cooperate with Canadian authorities, as do the UK and Australia.
Experts think this is a headache for Modi, but it is unlikely to blow up the significant strategic and trade relations between India and its Western friends.
“The US is likely to deliver a clear message to India about interfering in the internal affairs of allied democracies, especially Washington’s trusted Five Eyes partners,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group.
“But it’s also going to seek to contain the fallout from Delhi’s dispute with Ottawa with an eye to the bigger strategic prize: alignment with India as an essential partner to counter China.”
Behind the scenes, Canada’s allies can be expected to twist arms to try to get the Indians to call off their hit squads. If they don’t, they can expect police and intelligence agencies to keep a close eye on their diplomats, even while military and economic ties grow stronger.
FILE PHOTO: Members of media speak in front of cameras outside the premises of the Supreme Court in New Delhi, India October 13, 2022. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis/File Photo
Indian government opposes criminalizing marital rape as “excessively harsh”
India’s Supreme Court is hearing petitions this month and will soon rule on whether to criminalize marital rape, but the government opposes the idea, stating it would be “excessively harsh.” The Interior Ministry argues that while a man should face “penal consequences” for raping his wife, criminalizing the act “may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage.”
The petitions seek to overturn Section 375 of India’s Penal Codewhich lists “exemptions” for sex to be considered rape, including “by a man with his own wife” if she is not a minor. A lower Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict on the issue in 2022, but when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government overhauled the country’s penal code in July, the exemption stayed on the books. Modi’s party, the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, has longopposed changes for reasons of “illiteracy, poverty, social customs and values.”
But activists argue the 164-year-old law must be amended to combat systemic gender inequality. Sexual violence against women is rampant in India, andmedical workers are still striking over the August rape and murder of a trainee female doctor in Kolkata, for which a man was formally charged last Monday.
Around the world, more than 100 countries have outlawed marital rape. We’re watching whether public outcry – and a high court verdict - will force Modi’s government to do the same.