India's streets are seething. For the second time in a few months, the young people of the Cockroach Movement are shaking the foundations of Modi's rule. Is this the beginning of the end for Modi? I am joined by Sushant Singh, consulting editor of Caravan Magazine and lecturer at Yale University, to examine the electoral roll revisions behind the uprising, exposed when the Indian Express revealed that two election commissioners had opposed their own chief's unilateral moves. According to Singh, in a deeply unequal country like India, the vote is the only equality its citizens have. Modi, however, has answered this deep political crisis with paramilitaries and a capital under siege. With India's institutions hollowed out, the youth have nowhere left to turn but the streets.

The truth about dedollarization is that it is unfolding but without a concrete plan. In this explainer, I argue that the dollar system is collapsing under its own contradictions while alternatives from the Global South have stalled. Lacking an empire like Britain's, the US could supply dollars only through deficits and, later, financial bubbles. Today the Federal Reserve is trapped between inflation and said bubbles. The real obstacle to alternatives, however, is the world majority's elites, who park their speculative wealth in the dollar system.

Why are the AI promoters who spent months resisting regulation suddenly asking for it? Warwick Powell, adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, joins me to connect the doomsaying about AI destroying humanity, the new appetite for regulation and the postponement of OpenAI’s much-trumpeted IPO. With capital expenditure soaring and analysts seeing no pathway to profitability, these firms have every reason to seek protective cover from government, while open models from China that are almost as good and far cheaper cannibalise their market. He underscores the severity of the Dutch disease pulling workers and materials out of the rest of US construction and into data centres. In capitalism, the system adopts AI as a labour-replacing device replacing an ever-increasing number of workers. Courts in china, however, have prohibited laying workers off if they are substituted by AI. Now more than ever, we need to transfer ownership of the means of AI production from billionaire capitalists to the masses.

Wherever Narendra Modi travels, he comes home with a medal, and much of the world's media treats him as a statesman and a voice of the Global South. Aakar Patel, columnist, chair of Amnesty International India and author of Price of the Modi Years, joins me for the first time to separate the image from the record. Aakar describes a foreign policy with two registers. One is theater performed for validation abroad, which harder leaders have learned to exploit. The other is the external face of Hindutva, which explains the fixation on Pakistan and the embrace of Israel.

Mark Carney has a 70% approval rating and a global reputation as the man who stood up to Trump. But is any of it real? I am joined by Dimitri Lascaris of Reason to Resist, who calls it arguably the greatest political scam in Canadian history. The so-called trade war between Canada and the US is rather a skirmish that only covers under 5% of Canada-US trade. On everything else, however, Carney is in step with Washington, from 5% of GDP on the military and the scrapped digital services tax to support for the war on Iran. We examine how Carney is using the crisis to push through a neoliberal agenda, fast-tracking energy projects and inviting American capital to buy up Canada, while leaving trade with China and the BRICS largely untouched.

Is artificial intelligence the technology of the future, or the next great bubble? Michael Hudson joins me for another Geopolitical Economy Hour to discuss the looming AI economic crash. Michael compares the frenzy to the dot-com bubble and the railroad bubbles of the 19th century, while the scale of this one outmatches all what we have previously seen. We examine Washington's plan to turn AI into a monopoly choke point on the world economy and to make everyone dependent on proprietary technology so AI billionaires can continue to collect monopoly rents. China's open-source approach, however, is built around finite tasks and is already undercutting it. Meanwhile, the surging electricity and water costs driven by skyrocketing data centre projects are falling on local communities.

Is the war meant to break Iran now breaking Washington's Gulf allies instead? I am joined at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, who points out that seven months of siege and sanctions are strangling the oil-dependent Gulf monarchies that helped wage this war. With US bases around Iran destroyed or half destroyed, these states are emerging as diminished entities.

Will Europe go to war with Russia? At this year's Valdai Discussion Club conference, I am joined by Roger Köppel, owner of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, former editor-in-chief of Germany's Die Welt, and a former member of the Swiss parliament. Köppel warns that the world is closer to a third world war than at any time since 1945, even though Europe is too weak economically, militarily and politically for any confrontation with Russia. He sees Europe's disease as the triumph of moralism over realism, and the Ukraine war as its ultimate expression. In his account, Europeans pay, Ukrainians fight, and Americans collect the profits.