THE much awaited Preliminary Report (PR) of the investigation by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) into the horrendous crash of Air India flight AI-171 at Ahmedabad on June 11 this year was finally released on July 11th night. This just met the one-month deadline norm set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO, normally pronounced eye-kay-oh).Besides other investigations, the PR is supposedly an initial assessment of clear and complete data downloaded from one of the aircraft’s two Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorders (EAFR) found in the wreckage.

IF Israel-Iran ceasefire holds and the US President Trump, after his attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, decides that enough is enough, we might just see a glimmer of hope in the Israel-Iran war. The genocide in Gaza though continues, with its two million Palestinians offered only the choice of a quick death at the hands of Israeli forces, or a slow death by starvation. The Gaza holocaust is live on our screens every day.

THE Trump administration has started an unprecedented attack on American higher education. Using federal funds as a tool to seize control of universities and throttle academic freedom, a momentous shift in the US education and research landscape has been created. Mass grant cancellations, vicious budget cuts, and open political meddling in scientific work have been used in this attack. This has raised alarm amongst scientists and activists that there will be a wholesale dismantling of core research projects.

IN a bold challenge to US tech supremacy, Huawei has unveiled its most ambitious AI computing platform yet: the CloudMatrix 384, a high-performance AI training cluster based on its homegrown Ascend 910C chips. The platform is built to train large-scale AI models like those behind ChatGPT or Deepseek, which require enormous computing capacity.

IN the aftermath of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic – India finally confronts a harsh reality: the true toll of the pandemic was far greater than official counts ever recognised. Government figures now confirm what public health officials, data journalists, and international agencies had been warning all along – that COVID related deaths were greatly underestimated.India witnessed more than 21.5 lakh excess deaths in 2021 – nearly six times the official 2021 COVID-19 death toll of 3.3 lakh, according to a recent analysis published by The Hindu.