When disaster strikes, the last thing anyone wants to think about is whether the information they’re seeing on their phone is true. But in the chaos of an extreme weather event, misinformation can spread faster than the storm itself. It often starts small: someone shares a rumor about government corruption, or an AI-generated photo of a shark swimming through a flooded street. Within hours, that falsehood has been shared hundreds and thousands of times, until it feels real to a huge number of people. The stress and urgency of a crisis make it hard to slow down and fact-check, especially…

In late October 2026, the Union Territory Administration of Ladakh found itself in an open confrontation with Sonam Wangchuk, the well-known climate activist and education reformer from Ladakh. The issue was not about glaciers or temperatures but something more intimate: alcohol. During a press conference at Ladakh Bhavan in New Delhi on October 22, Wangchuk made dramatic claims about the administration’s excise policy. He said that hundreds of women were staging protests, that the Lieutenant Governor was behaving arbitrarily, and that alcohol was being thrust upon Ladakhi society. He described a region where liquor shops were suddenly being opened on…