Is Poplawski's "Cosmology with torsion" a "variable speed of light" cosmology? In his 2010 paper "Cosmology with torsion", Poplawski mentions that, in the hypothesized formation of a new temporally-local universe within a black hole, its "expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon's formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time".  If the apparent expansion of the "parenting" local universe outward from the region that will be containing the black hole proceeds at a relative rate at least equal to the speed of light prevailing within that "parent", its occupants might never be able to make any observation of the "baby" local universe, or receive any signal from it. This accounts for that infinitely-slow fading of objects reaching the event-horizon-in-formation which is usually hypothesized to occur, but, particularly since the gravitational effects of extant black holes are observable, would it not also imply a scaled-down speed of light within the new L U, or at least allow for a lower speed of light within it?         
 A: Perhaps partly as a result of his 2015 collaboration with Desai in "Non-parametric reconstruction of an inflaton potential" (which clarifies Poplawski's model as being a past- and future-eternal version of inflation), Poplawski's 2020 "Black Hole Genesis and origin of inertia" includes a modification of the model described in his 2010 "Cosmology with torsion".  The modification provides, within the scale invariance of 1929's Einstein-Cartan Theory, for a speed of light that would change over space, but not necessarily over time, thereby differing from the usual meaning of VSL.  (In Poplawski's view, the only direction of passage through time is inherited from the direction prevailing in the "Parenting White Hole" that's described in the beginning of the 2020 paper, whose preprint, like those of the others mentioned, is freely visible on Cornell University's Arxiv website, at https://arxiv.org/a/poplawski_n_1.html  .)
Poplawski refers to the inertial frame of reference as being "absolute" only within the context of a local universe ("the Universe") in an inflationary multiverse whose asymptotically-exponential expansion derives only from its shape (which he has analogized to the skin of a basketball), rather than resulting from the presence of any of the "inflaton" particles hypothesized in other inflationary models.  It consequently has an interesting resemblance to the mathematician Julian Barbour's "Shape Dynamics".  The basic idea of Black Hole Genesis (the formation of local universes within black holes) originated with the physicist Lee Smolin, who, like Barbour, has been much-involved in research at Canada's Perimeter Institute.
