THE space race was once between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is now – on the surface – between the three billionaires, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Two of them rode their sub-orbital flights, meaning that they cannot be considered as space flights as they did not reach a stable orbit around the earth. Branson’s ambitions are limited, more for a market for developing the exotica of space tourism. Elon Musk and his SpaceX have been playing for the long haul, with a series of rockets and launches including to the International Space Station.

THE winged horse of the Greek fable Pegasus is haunting the Modi government once again. 17 news organisations including The Wire, Washington Post, The Guardian along with two NGO's – Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories – have spent months examining a possible list of 50,000 phone numbers from 45-50 countries. They have found out who could indeed be possible targets of cyber attacks in these countries. They then forensically examined the phones on the target list of some of the people who were willing to have their phones tested.

COVID-19 caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been one of the most devastating pandemics. It has exposed the dark underbelly of the health systems in many developed countries with a dominant privatised system. There has been a massive loss of lives and livelihoods in the US, India, Brazil and several countries. It has also shown that countries with strong public health systems like China and Cuba have withstood the onslaught much better.

THE prime minister in his speech on June 7, partially reversed his widely criticised Covid-19 vaccine policy. What concerns us here is that he also went on to give a false account of India’s vaccine history: that it had not been able to vaccinate its people earlier and could not manufacture vaccines indigenously. It is only now – according to Mr Modi – that India had manufactured two vaccines indigenously.

WORLD Environment Day falls on June 5, each year and the theme for the coming decade has been declared as “Ecological Restoration.” It is indeed a tragedy that this article, written in commemoration of the Day draws attention to the ecological and human disaster unfolding in the Lakshadweep archipelago in the Arabian Sea, as well as in the Andaman & Nicobar island chain on the eastern flank of peninsular India in the Indian Ocean, in the name of “island development.”