ON October 8, 2019, in Dassault’s plant in Merignac in the south of France, Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh personally took delivery of the first of the 36 Rafale multi-role fighter aircraft India had acquired from France in 2015-16, the latter year being when the deal was signed. The handover was, of course, mostly symbolic since the first 4 Rafale fighters would arrive in India only in May 2020, while the first full squadron of 18 fighters would hopefully be available in India only in mid-2021 and the remaining 18 more than a year later in April 2022.

TWO recent studies on ancient DNA and migrations into South Asia appeared at the same time in two of the most prestigious journals of their disciplines, one in Science, and one in Cell. Both share a number of common authors and have used Harvard’s genetics laboratory resources. Each of the papers are important in their own right. The Science paper reports ancient DNA from 523 samples from a number of sites in Iran, Central Asia and Anatolia, and comparing it to the current population in the region and in south Asia.

AFTER a long, text-book Chandrayaan-2 mission since launch on June 22, right up till a mere 2 km or so above the lunar surface, the much awaited soft landing of the Vikram Lander in the south polar region of the Moon on September 7, 2019 could not be achieved due to reasons that are yet to be determined. From what little is known at present, it appears that control of the Lander was lost at the very last stage of its descent, and it made a hard landing or, to put it in plain language, crashed, although how badly, is still not known.

SAUDI Arabia, which started the Yemen war with its own coalition of the willing, is now facing the blow-back with Houthis launching a series of drone and missile attacks on infrastructure. Earlier Houthi missile attacks on Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports seems to have led to a rethink in the United Arab Emirates leadership on the dangers of military interventions abroad, leading to their partial disengagement from Yemen. The US also has now announced direct talks with the Houthis.

THE Netflix film, The Great Hack, relates Cambridge Analytica’s role in Trump’s 2016 elections to a much larger issue – the threat to our democracy from global tech giants.  It is not the Facebook data that Cambridge “hacked”, but the election itself.  And what is at stake is not just an election, but the very future of democracy. If elections can be hacked, so can our democracy. The film poses a fundamental question for our times: are more elections in more places going to be won by the best data “team” that money can buy?