As special envoys on COVID-19 for the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), we have witnessed first-hand the intensity of the suffering caused by the pandemic, especially in poorer communities.

Silicon Valley leaders tell us that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring untold benefits. They say it is already underway and accelerating, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, and warn that we will be left eating dust if we don’t get with the program. This upheaval – which also reflects the impact of robotics, bio- and nanotechnology, 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT) – is a general-purpose revolution.

Would the United States (US) be prepared to risk a catastrophic war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to protect the Republic of China (ROC), better known as Taiwan? President Joe Biden laid out his vision clearly last week.

The South China Sea (SCS), one of the most in-demand waterways in the world, is the object of contention of several claimant-states with overlapping territorial and maritime sovereignty and sovereign rights claims over its disputed waters. The said dispute is still unresolved until today and can be dated back to the 1950s.

Despite their increasingly bitter rivalry, the United States (US) and China have recently been sending the right signals regarding potential cooperation on combating climate change.

The Biden administration’s decision to stop opposing a proposed COVID-19 waiver of certain intellectual-property rights under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules is a welcome move.

When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.

While many central banks are still investigating the possibility of issuing a digital currency, China has rolled out a digital currency via a series of pilot programs since last year.

One of the most telling and compelling impacts of the coronavirus pandemic is how it has magnified the gap between the “haves and the have-nots;” the disparity in the living conditions of the developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries across the globe; and how it has aggravated further the poverty situation of low-income families and individual across countries except of course in China which even amid the pandemic was able to defeat extreme poverty within its borders lifting around

The governments of South Africa, India, and dozens of other developing countries are calling for the rights on intellectual property (IP), including vaccine patents, to be waived to accelerate the worldwide production of supplies to fight COVID-19. They are absolutely correct. IP for fighting COVID-19 should be waived, and indeed actively shared among scientists, companies, and nations.