AS the tension between the US and China mounts as a fall-out of Nancy Pelosi's provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between the two is also taking a new turn. Both houses in the US Congress have approved a $280 billion plan – The Chips and Science Act – to boost US chip manufacturing. Currently, 75 per cent of chip manufacturing in the world takes place in East Asia, centred around Taiwan, South Korea and China. The US aims to re-shore the semiconductor industry back to the US.

THE BJP government’s relentless assault on environmental regulations, and therefore on the environment itself, so as to serve the interests of corporates and their industrial, infrastructure and commercial projects, continues unabated. In a recent issue of this publication, readers would have seen a detailed critique of the atrocious amendments made by the union government to the Forest Conservation Act, giving free rein to the government to divert forest lands completely bypassing the rights of tribals, other forest-dwellers and their gram sabhas as enshrined in the Forest Rights Act.

WITH more than 4,000 cases (as on June 30, 2022), the recent outbreak of monkeypox in Europe and North America has become international news. World Health Organisation (WHO) has reacted by monitoring the progress of monkeypox globally and issuing guidelines regarding testing, and taking immediate measures. But WHO has not yet declared monkeypox a public health emergency.As long as monkeypox was confined to Africa, where similar outbreaks have been happening in Central and West Africa for years, it raised little concern.

THE normally bi-annual AIPSC, postponed by two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, was held in Bhopal on June 6-9, 2022. The delegate strength had also been reduced, as a measure of abundant caution with respect to the pandemic, from the usual 500-550 to around 350 delegates from all the 37 member organisations of the All India Peoples Science Network (AIPSN), apart from many observers and invited resource persons.

AFTER the relentless hype about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, LUNA, etc., for the last couple of years, we are now witnessing their complete meltdown. The hype was primarily driven by eye-popping increases in valuations of all the major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin had gone from around USD 4,000 to USD 64,000, a sixteen fold increase, in 20 months. Other cryptocurrencies had even more ridiculous price increases in the same time period – Ethereum had a 50 fold increase, Solana 500 times, and LUNA had a 1,000 times increase.