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.

At 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 severely hampered

lawmakers questioning the government. The opposition walked out, allowing Mr. Modi to ram

through 25 bills in three days. These kinds of authoritarian tactics are on the rise around

the world. The think tank Freedom House counts 80 countries where the quality of democracy

...