Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has accused the Indian government of putting pressure on the social media company to block accounts critical of the government amid the long-running farmers’ protest in 2021. Mr Dorsey, who was still the platform’s chief at the time before its takeover by Elon Musk, said India placed “many requests” during the months-long farmers protests. “India for example, India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government,” the former Twitter chief, who stepped down from the company’s board last year, said in a new interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points. “It manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country,” Mr Dorsey said. The protests in 2021 forced the Indian government to repeal laws that would have seen the biggest reforms to Indian agriculture in decades. Farmers drove tractors from agrarian states surrounding Delhi to block traffic on major roads into the capital city. Amid the protests, the Indian government allegedly threatened to punish Twitter employees with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for failing to suspend accounts deemed critical of the Modi administration. It demanded that Twitter block over a thousand accounts, including those tweeting under the hashtag “ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide”, arguing that the phrase was inflammatory. Following this, the social media company made over 250 accounts inaccessible to its India-based users, including that of the investigative news magazine The Caravan. The move was later reversed after a major public outcry. Twitter told the Indian government at the time that it would not comply with the directive to ban some accounts and tweets as they either constituted “free speech” or were “newsworthy”. Mr Dorsey compared India’s behaviour to that of Turkey. “We had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their in their courts and often won but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” he said. Indian IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekar rejected the former Twitter chief’s claims that the Modi government put pressure on the social media company, calling it “an outright lie,” and “an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.” “Twitter under Dorsey and his team were in repeated [and] continuous violations of India law. As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied,” Mr Chandrashekar said. The minister alleged that Twitter had a problem accepting the “sovereignty of India law,” and behaved “as if the laws of India did not apply to it”. “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’ ... India as a sovereign nation has the right to ensure that its laws are followed by all companies operating in India,” Mr Chandhrashekar said. “During the protests in January 2021, there was a lot of misinformation and even reports of genocide which were definitely fake,” the minister said, adding that the Indian government “was obligated to remove” them from the platform as it had the potential to “further inflame the situation based on fake news”. Mr Dorsey also commented on Twitter’s regime under Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, calling some of his moves “fairly reckless”. After taking over Twitter in October, Mr Musk proceeded to cut costs at the company and slash over three quarters of the firm’s workforce. “I think it set up a dynamic where he had to be very hasty, he had to be impatient, and he had to move as quickly as possible with features even if they weren’t fully thought out... It all looked fairly reckless,” Mr Dorsey said. Read More Twitter’s new chief echoes Elon Musk’s goal in first memo to employees Put ‘public good’ at heart of AI and new tech, Starmer to say Elon Musk is hilariously shut down by his ‘favourite’ podcast Bluesky, championed by Jack Dorsey, was supposed to be Twitter 2.0. Can it succeed? Jack Dorsey endorses Robert F Kennedy Jr for president Jack Dorsey says Twitter ‘went south’ after company’s sale to Elon Musk

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Nasa has received “puzzling” data from a spacecraft that was studying a distant asteroid. The space agency’s Lucy Spacecraft left Earth in 2021, with the aim of studying “Jupiter trojans”, a set of asteroids that fly around the Sun along Jupiter’s orbit and remain largely mysterious. Recently, scientists decided to send it to visit another small object on its way, largely as a test of the systems on the spacecraft that let it track asteroids for its mission. When Lucy arrived at that object – a main belt asteroid named Dinkinesh – it found a surprise, however. Images taken of the asteroid showed that it had a satellite, which flies around the asteroid like a tiny moon of its own. Now, further examination of those images show that the satellite is not one but two objects. Those objects make up a “contact binary”, or two smaller objects that are touching each other as they fly through space. The unexpected discovery explains some of the strange data that scientists had received as they approached Lucy. But it opens up more confusion about the whole system, which one called “bizarre”. “Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,” said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, in a statement. “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. “We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!” The flyby of Dinkinesh was only intended as a test of the spacecraft’s systems but has now posed new possible research for scientists. “It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist from NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.” “It is puzzling, to say the least,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, also from Southwest Research Institute. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.” The scientists were only able to confirm the nature of the system with the multiple images that were sent back by Lucy in the wake of its encounter with Dinkinesh. Nasa is working now to get the rest of the data from the spacecraft, which might include yet more surprises. Lucy itself will continue flying through space on a journey that is due to take 12 years. Lucy is actually heading back to Earth, which it will use for a gravity assist to propel it onto the next part of its journey, back through the main asteroid belt and onto the Trojan asteroids. Read More Nasa sending VR headset up to ISS to treat astronaut’s mental health All-UK space mission will ‘push boundaries of human knowledge’ All-female Nasa astronaut team departs International Space Station on spacewalk

Twitter has broken after seemingly being hit by an unusual bug. Some users were unable to log in or get online at all. But those who were could see something more strange: tweets displaying as if they were posted in 1970, and various posts refusing to load.