ON January 7, 2026, President Donald Trump posted on social media that the Pentagon budget would rise to $1.5 trillion, a 50 per cent increase over current spending and the largest peacetime military buildup since World War II. The announcement came barely four days after the United States abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a military raid on Caracas, killing over one hundred people, including thirty-two Cuban security officers.

After a gap of 2½ years, we now have certain sections of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, backed by the Rules, ready for immediate implementation. While the state’s powers to surveil citizens come into effect immediately, the sections that protect citizens' privacy against big data companies and the state (or correct/delete incorrect data) have to wait another 18 months. Some data protection indeed!

THE Modi government's new Bill, the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill, 2025 (passed by Lok Sabha on December 17 and under discussion in Rajya Sabha), effectively gives a free pass to the suppliers of nuclear plant and equipment.

WINTER is here, bringing with it a heavy pall of pollutant laden smog over Delhi, and on most of northern India along the Indo-Gangetic plains. During October-February, and especially during the peak pollution months of November-December, governments at the Centre and in Delhi, as well as the media and even the Supreme Court, are suddenly abuzz with policy statements, articles and commentary about air pollution and what needs to be done. From time to time, different scapegoats have been targeted as being primarily responsible, and silver bullet “solutions” are offerred.

MICHAEL BURRY, the investor made famous by the movie The Big Short after correctly predicting the 2008 housing collapse, is in the news again. Nearly twenty years ago, he warned that the US mortgage boom, built on weak loans, creative accounting and financial engineering, was bound to collapse. The American establishment dismissed him until the crash made his bets against the housing boom both immensely profitable and impossible to ignore. Now he has turned his attention to the artificial intelligence sector.