THE US-Israel war against Iran is a continuation of a war that the US and Israel have launched in West Asia against any country or organised resistance to their neo-colonial policies. However, Iran’s resistance, along with Hezbollah’s ability to fight Israel’s “expansion” into Lebanon, has created a new dynamic in the region for the first time. It has not only challenged US global hegemony but also shown that smaller military powers can resist much larger ones through asymmetric warfare.

Background

ON MAY 1, 2026, the United States Department of Defence finalised classified artificial intelligence contracts with eight corporations: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Oracle, SpaceX, and the startup Reflection AI. These agreements will deploy large language models on classified military networks. The one major AI laboratory that was excluded, Anthropic, was dropped because the Trump administration blacklisted it for insisting on safety guardrails.

The species of Andes hantavirus that has been in the news is not likely to affect us in India immediately. So far, that species has existed only in South America and on one cruise ship. Right now, large-scale outbreaks are probably not coming for us. The real threat is not hantavirus.  The real threat is the deliberate, systematic dismantling of global and national pandemic preparedness by anti-science regimes in the US and India. The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius is not an incoming plague – it's a dress rehearsal, a trial.

ALEX KARP, the chief executive of Palantir, published a 22-point manifesto on April 19 declaring that "hard power in this century will be built on software" and that certain cultures are "regressive and harmful." Five days later, the Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek released its long-awaited V4 model: 1.6 trillion parameters, open source under the MIT licence, matching the most expensive proprietary American models at roughly one-thirtieth the price.

Two events.