Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Many of the dizzying number of chemical elements in modern electronics are rightly called conflict minerals.

We visit mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where market forces and alleged corruption are driving conflict over cobalt.

And, as schoolchildren the world over know, the speed of light is truly a universal speed limit.

Nothing in the universe can go faster.

But what about the speed of sound?

We look into new research that puts a theoretical upper bound on that, too.

But first...

At the beginning of this year, protests were roiling India.

For a hundred days, hundreds of thousands of Indians raged

against proposed changes to citizenship laws

that would discriminate against Muslims. It was the biggest campaign of civil resistance in decades.

But the protests swiftly died out after local curfews were imposed in response to COVID-19,

curfews that were particularly strict in mostly Muslim neighborhoods.

To many, these new laws seemed like a calculated move by the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi,

quashing dissent under the cover of the pandemic.

In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday, he underscored the dangers of the virus

and called for renewed vigilance as the country heads into its festival season.

But behind the scenes, there's growing evidence that he's been using the crisis for his own partisan ends. Last month,

citing the risk of COVID-19 spreading within India's parliament, he announced measures that

...