MUMBAI: When pawns meet power plays, the game changes. Chess, the world’s oldest mind sport, is officially stepping deeper into the digital arena after the Esports World Cup Foundation confirmed it as one of 16 titles at the inaugural Esports Nations Cup 2026, set to unfold in Riyadh from 2 to 29 November.

For a game synonymous with quiet halls and ticking clocks, this is a bold move. Chess at ENC 2026 promises scale, spectacle and serious competition, fielding an unprecedented 128 players and opening the board to fresh talent and underrepresented nations as the sport’s esports evolution gathers pace.

The chess competition will run from November 2 to November 8, culminating in a playoff final. The opening phase features 128 players split into 16 round-robin groups of eight, with the top four from each group advancing.

That leaves 64 players battling it out in a single-elimination playoff bracket. Early rounds will be best-of-two, while the quarterfinals onward step up to best-of-four encounters. Deadlocks will be settled via Armageddon tie-breakers, and all matches will be played in a Rapid 10+0 format, designed for speed, tension and drama.

National pride is front and centre. Of the 128 slots, 64 players will receive direct invitations based on Champions Chess Tour rankings, limited to one per nation. Another 56 players will qualify through regional online qualifiers, while eight wildcard spots round out the field.

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Qualifiers will be hosted by Chess.com across seven regions, including Middle East + India + Central Asia, with two qualifier windows in June 2026. Each country can field a maximum of two players, ensuring both depth and diversity across the draw.

Chess already tasted esports stardom at the 2025 Esports World Cup, where 20 nations were represented and the intensity surprised even purists. The event ended with Magnus Carlsen lifting the title for Team Liquid, sealing chess’s credentials as a natural fit for high-stakes digital competition.

India’s top-ranked player Arjun Erigaisi called the experience “unlike any chess tournament I’ve played before”, adding that the energy of the esports stage is drawing new audiences into the game.

For commentators and fans alike, the shift to a nation-based format raises the stakes. Chessbase India co-founder Sagar Shah likened the moment to the excitement of the Chess Olympiad, while grandmaster and broadcaster Tania Sachdev said the national format adds “pride, pressure and passion” that pulls viewers in deeper.

From silent calculation to roaring crowds, chess at the Esports Nations Cup 2026 is less about moving pieces and more about moving perceptions. Checkmate, it seems, has gone fully digital.

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A wave of panic swept through Delhi and Mumbai over the past week as viral social media posts claimed a sudden spike in missing and kidnapped children. The alarm bells proved false. Both cities’ police forces issued categorical denials, pointing fingers at paid promotion and rumour-mongering designed to create public hysteria. The twist: fingers are now pointing at Yash Raj Films, accused of orchestrating the scare as guerrilla marketing for Mardaani 3, its upcoming vigilante thriller about child trafficking.

The episode lays bare a darker truth about India’s social media ecosystem. With smartphone penetration soaring and screen time at record highs, paid promotion tools have become weapons of mass hysteria. A few thousand rupees can boost a post to millions of eyeballs within hours. When that post plays on primal fears like child safety, verification becomes an afterthought. Users share first, question later. The result: manufactured crises that feel real until authorities scramble to debunk them.

Delhi Police took to Instagram 23 hours ago with a blunt message: “After following a few leads, we discovered that the hype around the surge in missing girls in Delhi is being pushed through paid promotion. Creating panic for monetary gains won’t be tolerated, and we’ll take strict action against such individuals.” The post, captioned “Facts matter, Fear doesn’t”, made clear the force’s irritation at being dragged into what it views as a manufactured crisis.

Mumbai Police followed suit, issuing a statement denying claims of kidnappings. “Certain social media handles are misrepresenting data and indulging in rumour-mongering regarding cases of missing and kidnapped children. We categorically deny these claims,” the force wrote. It added that FIRs were being registered against those “deliberately spreading false information and creating public panic.”

The misinformation spread with startling effectiveness. Popular Instagram and Twitter accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, shared alarming statistics and anecdotal reports of vanished children, tagging police handles and demanding action. The posts gained traction quickly, amplified by concerned parents and activists. Only when both police forces traced the origin of the claims did the facade crumble: many of the viral posts were boosted through paid promotion, a telltale sign of coordinated astroturfing rather than organic concern.

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Enter Yash Raj Films, the 50-year-old production house behind the Mardaani franchise. The series, starring Rani Mukerji as a no-nonsense cop battling human trafficking rings, has built its brand on gritty, socially conscious thrillers. Mardaani 3 is in production, and online chatter swiftly connected the dots between the missing persons panic and the film’s subject matter. Accusations flew: had YRF seeded fake stories to drum up buzz for its vigilante cop sequel?

YRF issued a furious rebuttal. “Yash Raj Films is a 50-year-old company founded on the core principles of being highly ethical and transparent,” a spokesperson said. “We strongly deny the accusations floating on social media that Mardaani 3’s promotional campaign has deliberately sensationalised a sensitive issue like this and we have immense trust in our authorities that they will share all facts and truths in due course of time.”

The denial is categorical, but scepticism lingers. Guerrilla marketing, viral hoaxes masquerading as public service announcements, manipulated data: these are not unheard of in Bollywood’s playbook, though rarely deployed on such a sensitive issue. Child safety is a third rail; exploiting it for box office returns crosses a line even by the industry’s elastic ethical standards.

Yet the evidence tying YRF directly to the posts remains circumstantial. No smoking gun links the production house to the paid promotions flagged by police. What is clear is that someone paid to amplify posts about missing children at precisely the moment a film about missing children was in the public eye. Whether that someone was a rogue marketing agency, an overzealous publicist, or a bad actor with no YRF connection remains murky.

The fallout is reputational. YRF, which has cultivated a family-friendly, socially responsible image across five decades, now finds itself defending against accusations of weaponising child safety fears. The Mardaani franchise, built on the premise of protecting the vulnerable, risks being tarred as exploitative. Rani Mukerji, the face of the series, has yet to comment.

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For Delhi and Mumbai police, the episode is a reminder of social media’s double-edged sword. The platforms amplify genuine crises but also manufacture fake ones with alarming ease. Paid promotion tools, designed to help legitimate businesses reach audiences, can just as easily turbocharge hoaxes. Distinguishing signal from noise requires resources and speed that overstretched forces often lack.

India’s social media consumption has exploded. The average urban user now spends over four hours daily on platforms, doom-scrolling through an endless feed of news, gossip and outrage. Algorithms prioritise engagement over accuracy, pushing emotionally charged content to the top. A post about missing children triggers immediate shares; a dry police denial struggles for traction. By the time fact-checkers mobilise, the lie has circled the country thrice.

Paid promotion supercharges this dynamic. For as little as Rs2,000, anyone can boost a post to lakhs of users, targeting specific demographics and geographies. The tools are legitimate, used daily by small businesses and political campaigns. But in the wrong hands, they become misinformation missiles. A fabricated crisis about child kidnappings, amplified by paid reach, looks indistinguishable from organic concern. Users see friends sharing it, assume it must be true, and hit repost. The cascade is self-reinforcing.

The broader pattern is troubling. Misinformation thrives on emotional triggers: fear for children, distrust of institutions, calls to action. A viral post claiming kidnappings demands immediate sharing; verifying it feels like wasted time when lives might be at stake. By the time authorities debunk the claims, the damage is done. Panic has spread, trust in institutions has eroded, and the original purveyors of the hoax have vanished into the digital ether.

This is the new normal. Every week brings a fresh panic: contaminated food, imminent disasters, communal violence rumours. Most prove baseless. Yet each one finds traction because social media rewards speed over truth. The infrastructure designed to connect people now excels at frightening them. Platforms profit from the chaos; advertisers pay for eyeballs regardless of whether the content is fact or fiction. The incentives are perverse, and there is no fix in sight.

Advertisement

Whether YRF is guilty or merely collateral damage in a misinformation campaign will depend on what authorities uncover in their investigations. The production house insists it has “immense trust” that police will reveal the truth. If that truth exonerates YRF, the studio will still carry the stain of association. If it implicates them, Mardaani 3 will enter cinemas under a cloud that no amount of box office success can dispel.

For now, the message from both police forces is unambiguous: there is no surge in missing children, the panic was engineered, and those responsible will face consequences. Parents can exhale. Social media users might want to pause before hitting share. And Bollywood’s marketers, ethical or otherwise, have been put on notice: weaponising fear for profit will not go unpunished.

A wave of panic swept through Delhi and Mumbai over the past week as viral social media posts claimed a sudden spike in missing and kidnapped children. The alarm bells proved false. Both cities’ police forces issued categorical denials, pointing fingers at paid promotion and rumour-mongering designed to create public hysteria. The twist: fingers are now pointing at Yash Raj Films, accused of orchestrating the scare as guerrilla marketing for Mardaani 3, its upcoming vigilante thriller about child trafficking.

The episode lays bare a darker truth about India’s social media ecosystem. With smartphone penetration soaring and screen time at record highs, paid promotion tools have become weapons of mass hysteria. A few thousand rupees can boost a post to millions of eyeballs within hours. When that post plays on primal fears like child safety, verification becomes an afterthought. Users share first, question later. The result: manufactured crises that feel real until authorities scramble to debunk them.

Delhi Police took to Instagram 23 hours ago with a blunt message: “After following a few leads, we discovered that the hype around the surge in missing girls in Delhi is being pushed through paid promotion. Creating panic for monetary gains won’t be tolerated, and we’ll take strict action against such individuals.” The post, captioned “Facts matter, Fear doesn’t”, made clear the force’s irritation at being dragged into what it views as a manufactured crisis.

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Mumbai Police followed suit, issuing a statement denying claims of kidnappings. “Certain social media handles are misrepresenting data and indulging in rumour-mongering regarding cases of missing and kidnapped children. We categorically deny these claims,” the force wrote. It added that FIRs were being registered against those “deliberately spreading false information and creating public panic.”

The misinformation spread with startling effectiveness. Popular Instagram and Twitter accounts, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, shared alarming statistics and anecdotal reports of vanished children, tagging police handles and demanding action. The posts gained traction quickly, amplified by concerned parents and activists. Only when both police forces traced the origin of the claims did the facade crumble: many of the viral posts were boosted through paid promotion, a telltale sign of coordinated astroturfing rather than organic concern.

Enter Yash Raj Films, the 50-year-old production house behind the Mardaani franchise. The series, starring Rani Mukerji as a no-nonsense cop battling human trafficking rings, has built its brand on gritty, socially conscious thrillers. Mardaani 3 is in production, and online chatter swiftly connected the dots between the missing persons panic and the film’s subject matter. Accusations flew: had YRF seeded fake stories to drum up buzz for its vigilante cop sequel?

YRF issued a furious rebuttal. “Yash Raj Films is a 50-year-old company founded on the core principles of being highly ethical and transparent,” a spokesperson said. “We strongly deny the accusations floating on social media that Mardaani 3’s promotional campaign has deliberately sensationalised a sensitive issue like this and we have immense trust in our authorities that they will share all facts and truths in due course of time.”

The denial is categorical, but scepticism lingers. Guerrilla marketing, viral hoaxes masquerading as public service announcements, manipulated data: these are not unheard of in Bollywood’s playbook, though rarely deployed on such a sensitive issue. Child safety is a third rail; exploiting it for box office returns crosses a line even by the industry’s elastic ethical standards.

Advertisement

Yet the evidence tying YRF directly to the posts remains circumstantial. No smoking gun links the production house to the paid promotions flagged by police. What is clear is that someone paid to amplify posts about missing children at precisely the moment a film about missing children was in the public eye. Whether that someone was a rogue marketing agency, an overzealous publicist, or a bad actor with no YRF connection remains murky.

The fallout is reputational. YRF, which has cultivated a family-friendly, socially responsible image across five decades, now finds itself defending against accusations of weaponising child safety fears. The Mardaani franchise, built on the premise of protecting the vulnerable, risks being tarred as exploitative. Rani Mukerji, the face of the series, has yet to comment.

For Delhi and Mumbai police, the episode is a reminder of social media’s double-edged sword. The platforms amplify genuine crises but also manufacture fake ones with alarming ease. Paid promotion tools, designed to help legitimate businesses reach audiences, can just as easily turbocharge hoaxes. Distinguishing signal from noise requires resources and speed that overstretched forces often lack.

India’s social media consumption has exploded. The average urban user now spends over four hours daily on platforms, doom-scrolling through an endless feed of news, gossip and outrage. Algorithms prioritise engagement over accuracy, pushing emotionally charged content to the top. A post about missing children triggers immediate shares; a dry police denial struggles for traction. By the time fact-checkers mobilise, the lie has circled the country thrice.

Paid promotion supercharges this dynamic. For as little as Rs 2,000, anyone can boost a post to lakhs of users, targeting specific demographics and geographies. The tools are legitimate, used daily by small businesses and political campaigns. But in the wrong hands, they become misinformation missiles. A fabricated crisis about child kidnappings, amplified by paid reach, looks indistinguishable from organic concern. Users see friends sharing it, assume it must be true, and hit repost. The cascade is self-reinforcing.

Advertisement

The broader pattern is troubling. Misinformation thrives on emotional triggers: fear for children, distrust of institutions, calls to action. A viral post claiming kidnappings demands immediate sharing; verifying it feels like wasted time when lives might be at stake. By the time authorities debunk the claims, the damage is done. Panic has spread, trust in institutions has eroded, and the original purveyors of the hoax have vanished into the digital ether.

This is the new normal. Every week brings a fresh panic: contaminated food, imminent disasters, communal violence rumours. Most prove baseless. Yet each one finds traction because social media rewards speed over truth. The infrastructure designed to connect people now excels at frightening them. Platforms profit from the chaos; advertisers pay for eyeballs regardless of whether the content is fact or fiction. The incentives are perverse, and there is no fix in sight.

Whether YRF is guilty or merely collateral damage in a misinformation campaign will depend on what authorities uncover in their investigations. The production house insists it has “immense trust” that police will reveal the truth. If that truth exonerates YRF, the studio will still carry the stain of association. If it implicates them, Mardaani 3 will enter cinemas under a cloud that no amount of box office success can dispel.

For now, the message from both police forces is unambiguous: there is no surge in missing children, the panic was engineered, and those responsible will face consequences. Parents can exhale. Social media users might want to pause before hitting share. And Bollywood’s marketers, ethical or otherwise, have been put on notice: weaponising fear for profit will not go unpunished.
 

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WASHINGTON: At OpenAI, the fight was not about artificial intelligence going rogue—it was about who got the GPUs.
An internal email from Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, sent on November 19, 2023, offers the clearest account yet of the events that culminated in the sudden firing of Sam Altman as OpenAI’s chief executive. Far from a single ideological rupture, Scott describes a combustible mix of resource wars, bruised egos and a board ill-equipped to manage the world’s hottest AI company.

According to the email, addressed to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, president Brad Smith and other senior leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever had been “increasingly at odds” with Altman on two fronts.

Read the full email below to find out:

[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]

From: Kevin Scott

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Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 7:31 AM

To: Frank X. Shaw, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Amy Hood, Caitlin McCabe

Frank,

I can help you with the timeline and with our best understanding of what was going on. I think the reality was that a member of the board, llya Sutskever, had been increasingly at odds with his boss, Sam, over a variety of issues.

One of those issues is that there is a perfectly natural tension inside of the company between Research and Applied over resource allocations. The success of Applied has meant that headcount and GPUs got allocated to things like the API and ChatGPT. Research, which is responsible for training new models, could always use more GPUs because what they’re doing is literally insatiable, and it’s easy for them to look at the success of Applied and believe that in a zero sum game they are responsible for them waiting for GPUs to become available to do their work. I could tell you stories like this from every place l’ve ever worked, and it boils down to, even if you have two important, super successful things you’re trying to work on simultaneously, folks rarely think about the global optima. They believe that their thing is more important, and that to the extent that things are zero sum, that the other thing is a cause of their woes. It’s why Sam has pushed us so hard on capacity: he’s the one thing about the global optima and trying to make things non-zero sum. The researchers at OAl do not appreciate that they would not have anywhere remotely as many GPUs as they do have if there were no Applied at all, and that Applied has a momentum all its own that must be fed. So the only reasonable thing to do is what Sam has been doing: figure out how to get more compute.

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The second of the issues, and one that’s deeply personal to llya, is that Jakub moreso than Ilya has been making the research breakthroughs that are driving things forward, to the point that Sam promoted Jakub, and put him charge of the major model research directions. After he did that, Jakub’s work accelerated, and he’s made some truly stunning progress that has accelerated in the past few weeks. I think that Ilya has had a very, very hard time with this, with this person that used to work for him suddenly becoming the leader, and perhaps more importantly, for solving the problem that Ilya has been trying to solve the past few years with little or no progress. Sam made the right choice as CEO here by promoting Jakub.

Now, in a normal company, if you don’t like these two things, you’d appeal to your boss, and if he/she tells you that they’ve made their decision and that it’s final, your recourse is accept the decision or quit. Here, and this is the piece that everyone should have been thinking harder about, the employee was also a founder and board member, and the board constitution was such that they were highly susceptible to a pitch by Ilya that portrays the decisions that Sam was making as bad. I think the things that made them susceptible, is that two of the board members were effective altruism folks who all things equal would like to have an infinite bag of money to build AGI-like things, just to study and ponder, but not to do anything with. None of them were experienced enough with running things, or understood the dynamic at OAI well enough to understand that firing Sam not only would not solve any of the concerns they had, but would make them worse. And none of them had experience, and didn’t seek experience out, in how to handle something like a CEO transition, certainly not for the hottest company in the world.

The actual timeline of events through Friday afternoon as I understand them:

Thursday late night, the board let’s Mira know what they’re going to do. By board, it’s Ilya, Tash, Helen, and Adam.

Mira calls me and Satya about 10-15 minutes before the board talks to Sam. This is the first either of us had heard of any of this. Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me.

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OAl Board notifies Sam at noon on Friday that he’s out, and that Greg is off the board, and immediately does a blog post.

OAl all hands at 2P to rattled staff.

Greg resigns. He was blindsided and hadn’t been in the board deliberations, and hadn’t agreed to stay.

Jakub and a whole horde of researchers reach out to Sam and Greg trying to understand what happened, expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.

Friday night Jakub and a handful of others resign.

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