The species of Andes hantavirus that has been in the news is not likely to affect us in India immediately. So far, that species has existed only in South America and on one cruise ship. Right now, large-scale outbreaks are probably not coming for us. The real threat is not hantavirus.  The real threat is the deliberate, systematic dismantling of global and national pandemic preparedness by anti-science regimes in the US and India. The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius is not an incoming plague – it's a dress rehearsal, a trial.

ALEX KARP, the chief executive of Palantir, published a 22-point manifesto on April 19 declaring that "hard power in this century will be built on software" and that certain cultures are "regressive and harmful." Five days later, the Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek released its long-awaited V4 model: 1.6 trillion parameters, open source under the MIT licence, matching the most expensive proprietary American models at roughly one-thirtieth the price.

Two events.

ON April 7, the US president opened his social media app and typed this about Iran and its 90 million people: "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." A genocide threat, in plain English. Could that happen without human language? No. The language conveys an inhuman threat. Language is not the true problem in this situation. The language arises from the arrogance of power and the greed for oil. These dress up mass death in a casual social media post. Iran's own language was mature, subtle, and alive.

THERE is more than meets the eye, whether it is the current US-Israel war on Iran now or the way we got our eyes. In both, it is not the creation of someone. However, an underlying dialectic is at work that needs to be understood. But this article is not about the ongoing imperialist war.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is now in well into its third week and, despite deployment of the overwhelming military superiority of the US and Israel, there seems to be no end in sight. Israel is continuing its bloodthirsty “decapitation” campaign against the top political, civilian and military leadership. It has murdered the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the internationally respected security chief and regime interlocutor Ali Larijani and numerous leaders of the regular army, the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Internal Security Basij force.