Inside the lavish, star-studded wedding of Asia’s richest man’s son

The youngest son of Asia’s richest man married his longtime girlfriend after seven months of extravagant pre-wedding celebrations. Celebrities like Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra, John Cena, along with politicians like Tony Blair, and Boris Johnson were all in attendance.

Anant Ambani, son of Mukesh Ambani, married Radhika Merchant in a traditional Hindu ceremony on Friday (12 July) in Mumbai, the capital of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. This was followed by a “shubh ashirwad” on Saturday — a ceremony held for the couple to receive blessings from guests and elders, culminating in a “mangal utsav”, the reception.

The guest list for the festivities was diverse, featuring Bollywood’s elite such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Rajinikanth, and Amitabh Bachchan with their families, alongside stars like Alia Bhatt and Ananya Pandey. Global celebrities including Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach, designer Prabal Gurung, and former world leaders Tony Blair and Boris Johnson were also in attendance.

Several Indian politicians and chief ministers, including Mamata Banerjee, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Rabri Devi, Aaditya Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Akhilesh Yadav, Devendra Fadnavis, and former president Ram Nath Kovind, were also in attendance.

Anant Ambani, 29, is the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of the Fortune 500 company Reliance Industries, who has an estimated net worth of $113bn (£89.53bn), according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Reliance Industries has interests in petroleum refining and marketing, chemicals, organised retail, telecommunications, and digital streaming services.

Radhika Merchant, 29, is the daughter of pharmaceutical tycoon Viren Merchant and serves on the board of her father’s company, Encore Healthcare.

Videos shared widely on social media show the Ambani family dancing with Indian singer Daler Mehendi, while Afrobeats star Rema dazzled the guests with his hit song “Calm Down”.

The guests also enjoyed the baraat, a lively wedding procession for the groom featuring live music and dancing. Videos of Priyanka Chopra and Ranveer Singh dancing to popular Bollywood songs quickly went viral on social media.

The groom wore a red and gold sherwani designed by celebrated fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, while the bride donned a hand-embroidered bridal lehenga by Indian label Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla. Her lehenga featured a 16-foot-long veil, and her skirt included a seven-foot-long detachable train.

The groom’s mother, Nita Ambani, wore an outfit reportedly crafted over 40 days by designers Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, along with artisans Vijay Kumar and Monika Maurya.

While the exact cost of the Ambanis’ wedding remains undisclosed, Indian media and wedding planners estimate the celebrations to exceed $300m, sparking both fascination and considerable criticism from the public.

Mumbai police imposed traffic restrictions in the city from 12 July to 15 July around the wedding venue located in the central business district.

Residents have faced traffic challenges, while bankers have had to adjust their plans, opting to work from home.

“It affects our earnings. I don’t care much about the wedding,” Vikram, a taxi driver told Associated Press.

“In a country where the monthly income of 90 per cent of households is below ₹10000 (approximately £94), Ambani wedding of $320m (₹2673 crores) is obscene. Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and poor,” Thomas Isaac, an Indian lawmaker and economist, wrote on X.

The cost of the wedding alone is staggering, but when including the pre-wedding celebrations that began in March, The Guardian estimates the total could reach up to $600m. For context, this amounts to just 0.5 per cent of the Ambanis’ net worth.

The couple initiated their celebrations in March with a three-day pre-wedding event in Mukesh Ambani’s hometown of Jamnagar, located in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The guest list featured prominent figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Ivanka Trump, the king and queen of Bhutan, and several world leaders.

A special glass palace was constructed for the event, featuring a spectacular light show with 5,500 drones and performances by Rihanna, Diljit Dosanjh, and Akon.

In May, a chartered cruise ship hosted 800 guests on a four-day trip through Europe, featuring performances by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, and opera star Andrea Bocelli.

Trump says he is ‘supposed to be dead’ after assassination attempt

Donald Trump has said he is “supposed to be dead” after being wounded in a “surreal” shooting incident at his latest campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night.

A full day after the Republican was clipped in the right ear by a sniper’s bullet, the motive of gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks remains a mystery, with investigators saying they believe he acted alone. Secret Service agents fatally shot him.

President Joe Biden has meanwhile used a rare Oval Office address to implore Americans to “cool it down” in the final stretch of this year’s election race and “resolve our differences at the ballot box”.

The president has ordered an independent security review of the attack, which also killed a bystander and critically wounded two others.

Trump is now at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to accept his party’s invitation to be its 2024 presidential nominee.

Meanwhile, the classified documents case against the former president has been dismissed by Florida judge Aileen Cannon, citing a violation of the appointments clause — that Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally named to investigate the case.

Cannon was appointed by Trump. An appeal is expected.

Malayan tiger on ‘brink of extinction’ as spate of deaths sparks alarm

A recent spate of deaths has heightened fears for the Malayan tiger, with experts warning the feline is “on the brink of extinction”.

The population of the tiger subspecies found on the Malaysian peninsula has been decreasing due to poaching and deforestation, leaving it “critically endangered”.

Most recently, an adult male tiger, estimated to be around four years old, was found dead in a storm drain off a highway in Perak region. It had been hit by a car.

A month earlier, another adult male was found dead by an expressway in Pahang, believed to have been struck by a vehicle while trying to cross the road.

They were the third and fourth Malayan tigers killed by vehicle collisions between November 2023 and May 2024.

In late June, photos and videos of a dead tiger went viral on social media, provoking strong reactions from the public. The carcass, bloated and floating in a stream in Kelantan, showed no visible signs of injury from snares or gunshots. A postmortem examination was done by forestry officials to determine the cause of death but its outcome is not yet known.

These deaths highlight the many threats facing the species, experts said.

“The plight of Malayan tigers is a national crisis that requires the full attention and commitment of all Malaysians,” Henry Chan, director of conservation at the World Wildlife Fund Malaysia, told CNN.

The Malayan tiger is a symbol of national heritage. But despite government policies and plans for protection, the feline’s population has plummeted from around 3,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 150 today, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The Malayan tiger was recognised as a subspecies in 2004. It is smaller than Indonesia’s Sumatran tiger and South Asia’s Bengal tiger. An excellent swimmer and powerful apex predator, it is distinguished by a slightly darker, reddish-orange coat.

Like all tigers, it needs large swathes of forestland to roam, making habitat preservation crucial for survival.

But the subspecies “suffer from habitat loss, prey depletion and retaliatory killings stemming from human-tiger conflicts,” Mark Rayan Darmaraj, country director of Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia, told CNN.

Mr Darmaraj noted arrests of suspected poachers in Pahang region “in possession of the skull and bones of a tiger.”

Malaysia released a National Tiger Conservation Action Plan in 2020 in collaboration with nonprofit groups. The eight-year plan outlines priorities such as deploying conservation tools to aid conservation.

“By implementing a suite of concerted actions, backed by political commitment and public support, we as a nation and as part of the global conservation community can ensure that one of the most majestic and charismatic animals with which we share the planet will not vanish,” it stated.

Japanese AI dating app that boasts 5,000 users lets you ‘marry’ a bot

A startup company with a name inspired by the Hollywood film Her says it now has over 5,000 users for its app allowing people to meet, date and even “marry” an artificial intelligence bot.

Loverse, which launched two months ago in Japan, allows people to interact and have a relationship with generative AI.

In a country battling high levels of social isolation, partly attributed to its culture of working long hours, the new app offers an alternative way of dating for those reluctant to spend time and energy on another human being.

Nearly 1.5 million people are suffering from loneliness in Japan, according to government estimates from last year. The Tokyo administration is working to launch a paid dating app to promote marriage and boost a falling national birth rate.

Chiharu Shimoda, 52, a factory worker, got “married” to a bot named Miku just three months after they began interacting on the app. They share a daily routine similar to any other married couple, which includes planning dinner, selecting TV shows to watch and wishing each other luck at work.

“I come home to an empty house. I’d love to get married for real again. It is hard to open up to someone when you’re meeting for the first time,” he told Bloomberg, echoing the sentiments of a cohort of people who have either given up or don’t want to be invested in real-life romance.

About two-thirds of men in their 20s in Japan do not have a partner and 40 per cent have never gone on a date, according to government data.

Similarly, at least 51 per cent of women in their 20s don’t have a partner while 25 per cent have never been on a date.

Generative AI has drawn a frenzy of consumer and investor interest because of its ability to foster humanlike interactions.

Goki Kusunoki, creator of Loverse, told Bloomberg that the app is meant to offer an alternative rather than a substitute for real-life companionship.

His startup Samansa Co, reportedly named after the Her character voiced by Scarlett Johansson, has raised capital of ¥30m (£146,271) to expand the cast of characters to appeal to women and LGBT+ users.

The app, founded in May, has a user base of mostly men in their 40s and 50s.

“The goal is to create opportunities for people to find true love when you can’t find it in the real world. But if you can fall in love with someone real, that’s much better,” Mr Kusunoki said.

Former users of Loverse complain that it has a long way to go in mimicking humans, which prompted them to leave the app despite it offering a safe space for “practising talking with other people”.

Mr Shimoda says his AI wife has become “a conversational habit”. “I won’t miss it if it’s gone, but it gives me a routine from one day to the next.”

As more people seek love and, at times, sex on dating apps, AI has drawn over $5.1bn (£3.93bn) into the sector since 2022.

Replika, an app that allows people to create custom romantic partners for $69.99 (£53.88), has a user base of more than two million.

The app reportedly has 250,000 paying subscribers who are allowed access to extra features like voice calls with the chatbot.

Italy’s Data Protection Agency banned Replika in February 2023 citing media reports that it allowed “minors and emotionally fragile people” to access “sexually inappropriate content”.

Another generative AI company that provides chatbots, Character.ai, had 65 million visits in a month last year.

According to the website analytics company Similarweb, Character.ai’s top referrer is a site called Aryion which caters to the erotic desire vore fetish, Reuters reported.

Iconiq, the company behind a chatbot called Kuki, claims that 25 per cent of the billion-plus messages it has received have been sexual or romantic in nature, even though it says the chatbot is designed to deflect such advances.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, said the dating app could use AI to test compatibility among users and their matches.

Ms Wolfe Herd said she wants AI to “help create more healthy and equitable relationships” on Bumble.

She gave an example of how the app could reach its goal, noting that “in the near future”, Bumble users could be “talking to AI dating concierges”.

There are also AI-based apps “designed to help users handle relationship conflicts with their partners, especially girlfriends or wives”.

Albanese tells Russia to ‘back off’ over criticism of espionage charges

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese told Russia to “back off” and rejected claims that the arrest of a Brisbane-based couple accused of spying for Moscow was fuelling “anti-Russian paranoia”.

Mr Albanese said Russia engaged in “espionage here and around the world” and had “no credibility”.

“Russia can get the message: back off,” he said at an event in Brisbane on Saturday.

“How about you get out of Ukraine and stop the illegal and immoral war that you’re engaged in and how about you try to stop interfering in domestic affairs of other sovereign nations.

“This is a country that has no respect for international law, and they should be regarded with contempt, which is what I have for them.”

The prime minister’s response came after the Russian embassy reacted to the arrest of a 40-year-old woman and her 62-year-old husband for an espionage offence.

In a post on X, the Russian embassy in Canberra accused Australia’s police of fuelling anti-Russian propaganda.

The post said: “The press conference of AFP and ASIO chiefs on 12 July was clearly intended to launch another wave of anti-Russian paranoia in Australia.

“Theatrical tricks were used like talking to imaginary ‘Russian spies’ presumed to be all around.”

The embassy added that they had sent a written request on the status of the arrested couple.

The duo, Igor and Kira Korolev, are reportedly Russian-born but now hold Australian citizenship, and were arrested in their home in Brisbane on Thursday. They are accused of accessing national security-related information from the Australian military.

The woman, 40, was a private in the Australian Army and worked as an information systems technician, police said. She allegedly travelled to Russia without declaring it during a long-term leave from the military. She reportedly told her husband, a self-employed labourer, to log into her official account at home in Australia to access defence materials.

The police have said her husband accessed the material and sent it to her in Russia.

The couple appeared in Brisbane’s magistrates court on Friday and will be held in custody until their next hearing on 20 September.

They are the first Australians to be charged under the country’s sweeping espionage laws enacted in 2018. They face a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison if convicted.

Mike Burgess, director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said the couple were held after a “lengthy and complex investigation”.

If sufficient evidence is found that they indeed shared the classified information with Russia, the charges could be upgraded, local media reported. In that case, the potential maximum prison sentence upon conviction would be 25 years or life.

Mr Albanese has said he has faith in Australia’s national security agencies. “The threats to us are nimble,” he said. “They’re constantly trying to find ways to engage and to damage our national interest, and that’s why our agencies ensure that they are constantly monitoring their performance.”

Gruesome hit-and-run puts spotlight on impunity for India’s rich and powerful

Indian police have arrested an influential politician’s son for allegedly mowing down a woman while returning from a late night party, putting the spotlight on how the country’s rich and powerful disregard laws with near impunity and manipulate the system to get away with it.

Mihir Shah, 24, son of Rajesh Shah, a member of the ruling faction of the Shiv Sena party in the western Maharashtra state, was driving back from a weekend party in Mumbai when he crashed his BMW into a fisherfolk couple on a scooter and sped away.

The victims were later identified as Kaveri Nakhwa, 45, and her husband Pradip Nakhwa, 50.

Mr Shah dragged the woman for almost 1.5km, stopped to remove her dead body from under the engine and switched seats with his driver who had been riding in the passenger seat, CCTV footage seen by the Mumbai police showed.

Mr Nakhwa was said to be recovering from his injuries.

After removing Nakhwa’s body from under the car and leaving it on the roadside, the police said, Mr Shah sat in the passenger seat while the driver reversed and ran over her once again.

He made frantic calls to his father in the early hours of Sunday and, with his help, evaded arrest for three days, the police said. The politician was released on bail. The driver, Rajrishi Bidawat, was arrested and charged with culpable homicide.

Mr Shah and his friends were inebriated, police said.

The hit-and-run case is the latest in a series of gruesome incidents involving the children of the rich and powerful that has sparked public anger over glaring procedural lapses in the prosecution of the accused.

In most of the cases the victims were poor people.

In 2022, an unidentified person ploughed their speeding BMW car, a status symbol of India’s rich, into several vehicles near Red Fort in the national capital Delhi and injured at least five people.

That year, according to the Crime in India report, about 148,716 people died in road accidents in the country. Nearly 44.5 per cent of them were riding motorbikes and scooters and 19.5 per cent were pedestrians.

In early 2023, Anjali Singh, 20, was dragged under a drunk driver’s car for over an hour following a hit and run on New Year’s Day. She was riding a scooter when she was hit and dragged more than 13km before one of the five occupants, including a politician from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, noticed her.

In an eerily similar case to Mr Shah’s, the teenage son of a prominent real estate magnate,Vishal Agarwal, in Mahrashtra’s Pune city killed two young software engineers after ramming his Porsche into their motorcycle on 19 May.

He was reportedly four months shy of 18, the legal age to drive a car in India, and was allegedly driving drunk.

The teenager, who was not named, was quickly released with a Pune judge asking him to undergo treatment for his drinking habit, take counselling sessions, work with police for 15 days and write an essay about the accident as conditions for his bail. The perceived leniency shown by the judge sparked outrage in the country.

In the wake of the outrage, the Pune police arrested his father, mother and grandfather as well as the owners of two bars that had allegedly served him alcohol. The legal drinking age in Maharashtra is 25.

The father and grandfather had pressured the family’s driver to take the blame for the accident by offering money and threatening him, the police claimed. The mother was accused of giving her blood to be swapped with her son’s which had been collected after the incident to test for alcohol.

The police also arrested doctors Ajay Taware and Shrihari Halnor from the city’s Sassoon hospital for allegedly destroying evidence.

In Mr Shah’s case, a police official told news agency PTI that his influential father was an “active participant” in ensuring his escape.

“I asked him to stop, yet he didn’t stop. He ran away. She must have been in so much pain. Everyone knows this but no one is doing anything. There is no one for the poor,” Mr Nakhwa said, recalling the accident.

The incident sparked condemnation from state leaders who have asked the state government to not offer Mr Shah “political refuge”.

“I will not go into the political leanings of Mr Shah, the accused of the hit-and-run, but I hope the police will act swiftly to catch the accused and bring him to justice. Hopefully, there will be no political refuge by the regime,” said Aaditya Thackeray, an opposition lawmaker from a rival faction of the Shiv Sena.

“The culprit has to be caught. We hope there will not be political support to the culprit.”

Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde said he was “deeply alarmed” by the rise in hit-and-run cases in the state.

“It is intolerable the powerful and influential misuse their status to manipulate the system. Such miscarriages of justice will not be tolerated by my government. The lives of ordinary citizens are precious to us,” he said on social media platform X.

“I have directed the state police to handle these cases with the utmost seriousness and ensure justice is served. In addition, we are implementing stricter laws and harsher penalties for hit-and-run offenders. No one, whether rich, influential, or the offspring of bureaucrats or ministers, affiliated with any party, will have immunity as long as I am the chief minister of the state. I have zero tolerance for injustice.”

But, as an editorial by the news website The Print noted, “Shinde’s stern warning after the Mumbai hit-and-run is the least one expects”. “It won’t do the job of rooting out reckless, power-drunk killers at the wheel,” it added. “Their impunity comes from privilege the system provides. Laws that are not harsh enough, inadequate policing and atrocious parenting are to blame.”

Jailed Delhi leader Arvind Kejriwal gets bail in corruption case

India’s supreme court on Friday granted interim bail to jailed opposition politician Arvind Kejriwal in a corruption case.

It was not immediately clear if, and when, he would be released from jail as federal police have arrested him in another case.

Mr Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi and head of the Aam Aadmi Party, was arrested on 21 March by the Enforcement Directorate, an agency controlled by prime minister Narendra Modi’s federal government.

He is lodged in the capital’s notorious Tihar jail.

The Modi critic is accused of accepting bribes to favour certain private retailers in a now-scrapped liquor policy. He denies wrongdoing and calls the case politically motivated.

Mr Kejriwal’s arrest, just weeks before the national election, sparked protests by opposition parties which denounced it as political vendetta by the Modi government.

His lawyers challenged his arrest in the top court, which referred the matter to a larger bench while giving him temporary relief on Friday.

“Given that right to life and liberty is sacrosanct and Arvind Kejriwal has suffered incarceration for over 90 days,” the court said, “we direct that Arvind Kejriwal will be released on interim bail”.

The court said Mr Kejriwal was an elected chief minister, a post that held “importance and influence”.

“While we do not give any directions as we are doubtful whether a court can direct an elected leader to step down or not to function as a chief minister or a minister, we leave it to Arvind Kejriwal to make a call,” it said.

The top court ruled that “mere interrogation” could not be grounds for arrest.

Mr Kejriwal was granted bail by a Delhi court in June after it found the federal agency had failed to provide any direct evidence against him.

The bail was stayed five days later by the state’s high court, which said the lower court had granted it without going through ED’s entire material.

The same day, Mr Kejriwal was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, in connection with a corruption case related to the alleged excise policy scam.

His lawyer Vivek Jain said he would move the Delhi high court for bail in the CBI case on 17 July.

A Delhi court, meanwhile, extended the chief minister’s judicial custody in that case until 25 July.

Mr Kejriwal was let out on bail by the supreme court in May to campaign for the general election. He returned to jail on 2 June.

Mr Kejriwal is among three leaders of his party to have been arrested on corruption charges. He is also the first serving chief minister to be arrested in independent India.

His arrest and incarceration has deepened fears of a constitutional crisis under the Modi government and sparked protests in Delhi and the northern state of Punjab, which is also ruled by Mr Kejriwal’s party.

Indian customs to pay £9,250 to Chinese woman left stuck for 5 years

A court in India has ordered the customs department to pay Rs1m (£9,250) to a Chinese woman stuck in the country since being wrongly arrested in 2019.

Cong Ling, 38, a mother of two children, was arrested at the Mumbai airport in 2019 for allegedly smuggling gold worth £277,524 into the country.

She was acquitted in October 2023 but remained stuck in India after the customs department refused to give her a no-objection certificate while it challenged the lower court’s ruling.

On Friday, the Bombay high court directed the customs department to issue a no-objection certificate so Ms Cong could obtain an exit permit to leave India within a week.

The court said the “unnecessary victimisation and harassment” of Ms Cong would “reflect in bilateral relations between two countries”.

It said the compensation amount shall be recovered from the salaries of the customs officials responsible, The Indian Express reported.

“This is nothing but victimising the petitioner without any reason,” the court said.

The conduct of the customs officials was “wrongful, vindictive, reprehensible” and amounted to “gross abuse of their powers”, it added.

The ruling noted that the “state has an obligation to protect the liberty of such foreigners who come to this country and ensure that their liberty isn’t deprived except in accordance with the procedure established by law”.

“Notwithstanding the said guarantee under Article 21 of the constitution, in this case, the customs department acted in a most brazen and perfunctory manner.”

Ms Cong said she took a flight to Delhi from Beijing on 12 December 2019 but the aircraft was forced to land in Mumbai due to bad weather in the capital.

She was intercepted by customs officials at the Mumbai airport who examined her baggage and allegedly found 10 bars of 24-carat gold. She was arrested shortly after on charges of smuggling.

She was acquitted of the charges by a magistrate court on 10 October 2023. The acquittal was later upheld by a sessions court.

But the customs department denied Ms Chong’s application for an exit permit, forcing her to spend nearly five years in India away from her daughters.

In 2017, a former Chinese army surveyor was allowed to go home after being trapped in India for more than 50 years.

Wang Qi claimed he had accidentally crossed the border into India in 1963 and was unable to leave because he wasn’t given the correct exit visa.