In the year 2034, the United States (US) and China become embroiled in a series of military conflicts that escalate into a devastating tactical nuclear war. Other countries – including Russia, Iran, and India – get involved. Suddenly, the world is on the verge of World War III. This is the scenario described in 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, an engrossing work of speculative fiction by NATO’s former supreme commander, Admiral James Stavridis, and Elliot Ackerman.

Philippine politics has been predominantly characterised as an “elite democracy” dominated by elite political parties, personalities, and political clans who are not only “gurus” of political “clientelism,” but are more often than not co-opted and under the tutelage of oligarchs, in which power brokers deliver votes to politicians in exchange for the granting of favours and “special privileges.” Philippine politics is also very much dictated by personality-based politics and is large

Young people today are coming to age in a world beset by crises.

In his elegiac memoir The World of Yesterday, which he wrote while in exile from the Nazis, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig observed that most people cannot comprehend the prospect of catastrophic changes in their situation. Things can get incrementally worse for a long time without prompting a reaction. Once catastrophe strikes, it is too late to act.Dramatic changes are occurring in our times, too, and we must hope that it is not yet too late to address them.

Tiziano Terzani was no fan of Singapore. The Florentine writer and journalist explored every corner of Asia. He had witnessed the fall of Saigon to the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong, and the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.

If an evil mind were to engineer the perfect virus to wipe out an animal species, it would choose the optimal combination of transmissibility and infection fatality rate.

The quest of finding the root cause and origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is as important as the development of vaccines that will not only prevent moderate and severe COVID-19 cases and deaths but vaccines that offer infection and disease-blocking effectiveness and efficiency. According to Dr Gregory Poland, a vaccine scientist at the Mayo Clinic, “the current vaccines block disease, but they do not block infection.” Thus, understanding the origin of the novel coronavirus is

COVID-19 has now been with us for more than a year and a half. It has stopped societies in their tracks, triggered sharp economic downturns, and killed more than 4.2 million people. But we still do not know where the deadly virus came from, for a simple reason: China does not want us to know. China first reported that a novel coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan weeks after its initial detection. This should not be a surprise.

I’m writing from Victoria, the Australian state that became, in 1970, the first jurisdiction in the world to make it compulsory to wear a seat belt in a car. The legislation was attacked as a violation of individual freedom, but Victorians accepted it because it saved lives. Now most of the world has similar legislation.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the United States (US) had a grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union.