Evolutionary pressures accompanying the spread of the coronavirus have driven the COVID-19 pandemic into a phase in which new variants are starting to pop up everywhere.
Emboldened by its cost-free expansion in the South China Sea, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime has stepped up efforts to replicate that model in the Himalayas.
The year of the ox has begun darkly for the people of Hong Kong.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated a wide range of inequalities. If leaders are serious about “building back better,” policies to overcome the systemic forces that underlie them must form the heart of their agendas.One such divide is the gender gap.
It is easy to forget that for a long time – long before Google and Facebook went head-to-head with the Australian government last month – there wasn’t a proven business model for the internet.
One month ago, in Myanmar, protesters against the military coup gathered around the United States (US) embassy in Yangon. They called on President Joe Biden to make the generals go back to their barracks and free Aung San Suu Kyi from detention. Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a big victory in the 2020 general election, which is why the generals, afraid of losing their privileges, seized power. But is the US embassy the best place to protest?
Over the past year, rich-country governments and central banks have provided unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus to help mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a recent letter to her G20 colleagues, United States (US) Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen argued that a truly global COVID-19 vaccination program “is the strongest stimulus we can provide to the global economy.” With rich countries vaccinating their populations while low-income countries have yet to receive even paid-for vaccine doses, the world seems a long way from that goal. But the first shoots of solidarity are beginning to appear, and leaders must strengthen cooperati
When China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, recently called for a reset of bilateral relations with the United States (US), a White House spokesperson replied that the US saw the relationship as one of strong competition that required a position of strength.
Human beings are creatures of habit. We tend to envisage a future much the same as the past, so we cling to familiar tools, approaches, and perspectives, even as the world changes.
As the world enters the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, vaccination has moved front and centre in policymakers’ responses. But while vaccines offer the surest way out of the crisis, countries are approaching them in different ways. Some are racing to vaccinate their populations, while others await longer-term efficacy data before beginning.
Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 is one of mankind’s most critical non-wartime efforts ever. Many countries have developed ambitious, politically sensitive, and carefully sequenced vaccination plans, but executing them successfully will be a challenge. To succeed, policymakers should build three realistic assumptions into their vaccination planning for 2021 and beyond. First, delays are inevitable.
