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.

THE Government of India, in the last quarter of 2023, framed some controversial regulations called Green Credit Rules (GCR) under the Environment Protection Act (EPA) of 1986. Undoubtedly, at first glance, it appears to be a good initiative targeting crediting individuals or institutions imparting plantation activities across the country. The Government of India espouses these "climate positive actions" as part of its international commitment towards maintaining a clean atmosphere. The union government believes that, with the introduction of GCR, plantation activities will get a push.