A Bigger Middle East War?

Why is the US evacuating non-essential embassy staff and their families across the Middle East? With no precise official explanation, there are concerns about the Iranian nuclear programme going fully rogue. The IAEA has complained that Tehran isn’t cooperating on nuclear material found at undeclared sites. Talks between the US and Iran about a deal that would stop Tehran short of a nuclear weapon have stalled and US President Donald Trump has said he isn’t going to let the Islamic Republic build a nuke. However, the evacuation is based on an assessment that the region “could be a dangerous place”. The bottomline is fears of a fresh and big Israeli strike. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long advocated a military solution to Iran’s nuclear programme—and Trump didn’t seem happy after his phone conversation with Netanyahu this week. Iran could retaliate by striking US facilities in Iraq, which it has done before, after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. More recently, Israel and Iran twice came to the brink of war. Meanwhile, a former CIA analyst, Asif William Rahman, has been sentenced to 37 months for leaking classified information about Israel’s plans to strike Iran last time.

The Pentagon’s UFOs

All the time Americans were subscribing to the post-war UFO cult, they didn’t know that the Pentagon itself was fuelling much of that myth, including legends around Area 51 in the Nevada desert, to hide projects developing top-secret stealth fighters. The Pentagon was so paranoid about locals seeing a test flight or the Soviets finding out that it spread the rumour that the military was testing recovered alien technology. Matters were complicated by recent public claims from former Pentagon officials that the government was fiddling with extraterrestrial technology and hiding it from Americans. A 2024 report from an investigation laid the rumours to rest but amounted to a cover-up of its own—hiding, at the insistence of the Air Force in particular, that the Pentagon itself had a hand in the UFO mythology. A Wall Street Journal investigation has nailed the lie within the lie with the help of Sean Kirkpatrick, a retired missile and space scientist, who had led the investigation. A shocking discovery was a hazing ritual that swore new Air Force commanders of classified programmes to secrecy after showing them a purported photograph of a flying saucer supposedly being reverse-engineered. Perhaps this led to the popular belief that the
Pentagon had things to hide?

A Musical Genius

Brian Wilson, co-founder of The Beach Boys, creator of complex harmonies for avant-garde themes and populariser of surf-rock, died at 82 after having made one of music’s most heart-warming comebacks in the 1990s. With his brothers Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, Wilson had formed the only US band to rival The Beatles in the 1960s. Classics like ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘I Get Around’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, etc or an innovative album like Pet Sounds couldn’t mask Wilson’s losing battle with mental health and drugs. But he survived as did his music. The Beatles were fans, after all.

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