#FactCheck- No, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei Is Not Dead—Viral Video Debunked

Executive Summary
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A video circulating on social media allegedly shows an Indian Army Air Defence JCO, identified as “Anurag Thakur,” criticising the Central government and announcing his resignation. In the clip, the individual is purportedly heard expressing disappointment with the government’s support for soldiers and claiming heavy casualties within his unit. However, an investigation by the CyberPeace Research Wing has found the claim to be false and the video manipulated.

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Claim:
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The viral post alleges that an Indian Army Air Defence JCO criticised the Centre and resigned, citing lack of support for soldiers and unacknowledged casualties.

• https://archive.ph/mGa5I 

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Fact Check:
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A keyword search using terms such as “Indian Army Air Defence JCO,” “Anurag Thakur,” and “resignation” did not yield any credible news reports supporting the claim. A reverse image search of the viral clip led to an original video posted by ANI on April 22, 2026. The ANI watermark is also visible in the viral footage, confirming that the clip has been sourced from this original video.

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In the authentic version, the same personnel appears in the same setting, but he is speaking in Hindi about operations against adversary drones during “Operation Sindoor” in May 2025. He explains how his unit detected and neutralised multiple drones, successfully safeguarding a critical installation. Importantly, the original video does not identify the individual as Anurag Thakur, nor does it contain any reference to resignation, casualties, or criticism of the government.

Further technical analysis using the AI detection tool Hive Moderation indicated that the audio in the viral clip has an 86 percent likelihood of being artificially generated.

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Conclusion:
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The viral video has been altered with fabricated audio to falsely claim that an Indian Army officer criticised the government and resigned. The claim is baseless and the clip is a clear case of a deepfake created to mislead viewers.

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Executive Summary

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A video showing children crouching as the ground shakes violently is being widely shared on social media with the claim that it shows the aftermath of a devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake that struck Colombia on August 10, 2026. However, the CyberPeace Research Wing found that the video is not from Colombia. The footage was recorded in the Philippines two months earlier during a more powerful earthquake.

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Claim

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An X user shared the video on August 10, 2026, claiming that it showed a massive 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Colombia that killed hundreds of people and destroyed thousands of homes. “Massive 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Colombia! Hundreds dead, thousands of homes destroyed,” the post claimed.

https://perma.cc/58CL-BXZ6 

https://x.com/anandsh04294243/status/2086911617938362779

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Fact Check

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To verify the claim, the Desk conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the viral video. The search led to the same footage being shared on social media on June 8, where it was linked to a powerful earthquake in the southern Philippines. The posts identified the footage as being related to a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the region, causing buildings to collapse, triggering landslides and prompting tsunami warnings.

https://x.com/WeatherMonitors/status/2063855713223635055 

Further research found that the video was recorded at Tubalan Elementary School in Malita, Davao Occidental province, Philippines.

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According to the edit history of the Facebook post, the user initially stated that the footage showed the first day of school at Tubalan Elementary School. The user later updated the caption, urging viewers not to blame the teachers. The updated post stated that the students were outside near the school’s basketball court when the earthquake struck and were subsequently evacuated to safety without any injuries. The school also issued a separate post on Facebook to address what it described as a misconception arising from the video circulating on social media. The school clarified that the outdoor gymnasium was not being used as an evacuation area after the earthquake. It said the students were already inside the gymnasium for the scheduled flag ceremony when the earthquake occurred.

The Desk also searched for reports about the earthquake and found a detailed report published by Barron's, which confirmed the occurrence of a major earthquake off the southern Philippines. The report also mentioned casualties and tsunami warnings following the quake. https://www.barrons.com/news/major-quake-off-philippines-kills-one-triggers-tsunami-warnings-665c527c 

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Conclusion

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The viral video does not show a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Colombia. The footage was recorded at Tubalan Elementary School in the Philippines and was shared online in June 2026 in connection with a powerful earthquake that struck the southern Philippines. Therefore, the claim that the video shows the August 10, 2026 earthquake in Colombia is false.

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Most laws regulate what people do. This one regulates what clock everyone is doing it by, and once you sit with that idea for a moment, it stops sounding like a bureaucratic footnote and starts sounding like something genuinely foundational.

On 27 August 2026, India's Department of Consumer Affairs notified the Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026, making Indian Standard Time the single legally binding reference for every legal, administrative, commercial, and official purpose across the country. The Rules will come into force 180 days after their publication in the Official Gazette, giving government departments, businesses, and institutions a compliance runway to align their systems before the requirement actually bites.

Why time needed a law at all

It might seem strange that a country needs legislation to tell everyone what time it is. India has used IST, a single time zone five and a half hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time, since 1947. But using a time zone informally and legally mandating it as the sole authoritative reference for every official and commercial transaction are two very different things, and the gap between them is exactly where this rule lives.

The government's own reasoning, laid out in its official statement, centres on a shift most people experience daily without ever thinking about its plumbing. Banking and digital payments, telecommunications networks, railways, power grids, and government record systems all depend on accurate, synchronised time stamps to function correctly. When different systems quietly draw their time from different sources, even by fractions of a second, the resulting inconsistencies can affect the coordination and recording of transactions in ways that are invisible until something goes wrong. A trade executed on a stock exchange, a UPI payment cleared between banks, a railway signal handoff between two junctions, and an emergency service dispatch all depend on every clock in the chain agreeing with every other clock, and until now, India had no single rule compelling that agreement.

The quieter, more interesting part of the rule

Buried inside the announcement is a detail that matters more than the headline. The Rules do not simply declare IST the law of the land; they also authorise the use of NavIC, India's own satellite navigation system, alongside other approved domestic timing sources, as legitimate means of disseminating that time. The government's stated rationale is candid about the current state of affairs: several critical Indian systems presently draw their time from foreign satellite based sources, and building domestic timing infrastructure through NavIC and legal metrology laboratories is intended to reduce that dependence going forward.

That single sentence carries real weight once you consider how global positioning and timing systems actually work. Most of the world's precise digital time synchronisation ultimately traces back to GPS, the American satellite constellation, whose signals also happen to be notoriously easy to disrupt. GPS and other satellite navigation signals arrive at receivers on Earth as extremely weak radio transmissions, weak enough that they can be jammed with cheap equipment or spoofed, meaning an attacker broadcasts a counterfeit signal that mimics a legitimate one closely enough to fool a receiver into accepting false position or timing data. Researchers and government reports going back years have flagged that a large share of critical infrastructure sectors, power grids, financial markets, telecommunications, and transport among them, carry meaningful dependence on GPS derived timing, and a 2017 UK government assessment specifically warned that systematic satellite signal jamming could cause serious disruption to a country's financial, electricity, and communications systems all at once. Cybersecurity researchers have separately demonstrated proof of concept attacks where a deliberately falsified timing signal, rather than a falsified position, was enough to destabilise systems that assumed their clock could always be trusted.

Seen against that backdrop, embedding NavIC as an approved domestic timing source inside a legal metrology framework is not merely a nationalistic footnote about self reliance. It is a genuine resilience decision. A country that can generate, verify, and distribute its own trusted time signal, independent of a foreign satellite constellation that it does not control and cannot secure on its own, has a meaningfully smaller attack surface for an entire category of infrastructure disruption that rarely makes headlines until it actually happens.

Who actually built this, and why that composition matters

The drafting process itself offers a useful clue about how seriously this was treated. Reports on the rule making process indicate the Rules were shaped by a high powered inter ministerial committee chaired by the Secretary of Consumer Affairs, with representation from the National Physical Laboratory and the Indian Space Research Organisation for the underlying science and satellites, IIT Kanpur for engineering expertise, the National Informatics Centre and CERT In for network infrastructure and its security, the Securities and Exchange Board of India for financial market implications, and the Railways, Telecom, and Financial Services departments for the systems that will actually have to run on this new standard day to day. That is not a committee assembled around a single ministry's convenience; it is a committee assembled around the actual shape of the problem, spanning physics, engineering, finance, and network security together. As part of the broader One Nation, One Time initiative, a White Rabbit Technology based IST Dissemination Demonstration Network was already commissioned at the Regional Reference Standard Laboratory in Bengaluru back in July 2026, suggesting the infrastructure groundwork was underway well before the legal framework caught up to it.

What the 180 day window actually means in practice

It is worth being precise about what compliance actually requires here. This is not a deadline demanding new hardware overnight; for most organisations, it means auditing which internal systems currently reference time from an unverified or foreign source and ensuring they align with certified IST going forward, alongside institutions preparing to receive that certified time through the domestic infrastructure the government is simultaneously building out. The six month runway exists precisely because this touches an unusually wide spread of sectors at once, and forcing an abrupt cutover would create more operational risk than the rule is designed to remove.

The bigger picture

A rule about what time it is legally does not sound like cybersecurity news, and on the surface, it is not. But underneath the administrative language sits a genuinely forward looking recognition: as more of daily life, banking, communication, transport, and governance runs on systems that must agree, down to the second, on a shared reference point, the integrity of that reference point becomes critical infrastructure in its own right. India choosing to build, verify, and legally anchor its own trusted time source, rather than continuing to quietly rely on a foreign satellite system it cannot secure independently, is less about symbolism and more about closing a vulnerability most people never knew existed until they were asked to think about it.

References

1. OpenGov Asia, "India Issues Rules to Standardise National Time Reference Systems." https://opengovasia.com/india-issues-rules-to-standardise-national-time-reference-systems/?c=us
2. Daily Excelsior, "Centre notifies rules mandating IST as common time reference; 180 day window for compliance." https://www.dailyexcelsior.com/centre-notifies-rules-mandating-ist-as-common-time-reference-180-day-window-for-compliance/
3. Greater Kashmir, "Department of Consumer Affairs notifies Legal Metrology Rules, 2026." https://www.greaterkashmir.com/national/department-of-consumer-affairs-notifies-legal-metrology-rules-2026-12454447
4. Insights on India, "Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026." https://www.insightsonindia.com/2026/08/31/legal-metrology-indian-standard-time-rules-2026/
5. Blitz India Media, "Indian Standard Time Rules 2026: NavIC, Legal Metrology." https://blitzindiamedia.com/news/indian-standard-time-rules-2026-navic-legal-metrology/
6. Observer Voice, "India Establishes Legal Framework for Standard Time." https://observervoice.com/india-establishes-legal-framework-for-standard-time-225958/
7. The Live Nagpur, "Govt notifies rules to make IST the common time reference." https://thelivenagpur.com/2026/08/31/govt-notifies-rules-to-make-ist-the-common-time-reference/
8. Safran Navigation and Timing, "GNSS Security and Cybersecurity: What are the Parallels?" https://safran-navigation-timing.com/gnss-security-and-cybersecurity-what-are-the-parallels/
9. Safran Navigation and Timing, "Securing Critical Infrastructures from Jamming and Spoofing Cyberattacks." https://safran-navigation-timing.com/securing-critical-infrastructures-from-jamming-and-spoofing-cyberattacks/
10. Combain, "The Silent Threat In The Sky: GPS Jamming, GPS Spoofing." https://combain.com/gps-jamming-spoofing/

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