The COVID-19 pandemic underscores just how tightly interwoven humanity has become. A single infected animal somewhere in China set in motion a chain reaction with effects that, nearly a year later, are still reverberating in every corner of the planet. This should not be particularly surprising. The history of pandemics tracks our unification as a species. The Black Death travelled on new trade routes forged between Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages.

As I write this, officials across the United States (US) in the 2020 US presidential election are faced with recounts and legal challenges. This is to be expected in a hotly contested election that generated a record turnout.While only citizens may vote for the US president, the outcome in the world’s most powerful country affects people everywhere. On the positive side, the US remains a robust democracy.

At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, participants promised to advance the rights of women and girls everywhere. Part of that promise, set out in the historic Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, was to ensure education for all girls.

America’s allies should be forgiven if they are confused about where American foreign policy is headed. Who isn’t, given the go-it-alone recklessness of Donald Trump’s presidency? Over the past three years, Trump has sowed strategic chaos, and his foreign policy, if one can call it that, brought new meaning to incoherence. President-elect Joe Biden will be better almost by default.

Joe Biden has survived a gruelling election campaign and a cliff-hanger election. Next, he must fend off legal challenges from United States (US) President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Elections tend to bring differences to the fore. That is certainly true of the United States’ (US) recent presidential election. Among the most bitterly contested elections in the country’s history, the outcome will have profound implications for many aspects of US policy.

The Chinese fintech conglomerate Ant Group, known for its digital payments and other online financial services, has just been stopped in its tracks, after Chinese regulators suspended its simultaneous public listing, originally scheduled for 5 November, on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Exchanges. The suspension is possibly in response to a recent speech by Jack Ma, Ant’s controlling shareholder, who was critical of financial regulations that he believes show insufficient understan

Opinion polls in the United States (US) have long pointed to the strong possibility of a Democratic Party sweep in the election on 3 November, with Joe Biden winning the presidency and Democrats gaining control of the US Senate and holding on to the House of Representatives, putting an end to divided government. But if the election turns out to be mostly a referendum on US President Donald Trump, Democrats might win just the White House while failing to retake the Senate.

At certain moments in history – often after substantial social progress has discomfited certain segments of society – an individual appears on the political scene claiming to stand for something grand and new. Skilled in the arts of self-presentation and emotional manipulation, he (it is always a man) captures the hearts and minds of millions with his macho bluster. In due time, a personality cult forms around him.

The strange and dispiriting United States (US) presidential election campaign has been marked by an absence of substantive debate and a deluge of lies. As Joe Biden said of Donald Trump in the first televised debate, “The fact is that everything he’s saying so far is simply a lie. I’m not here to call out his lies. Everybody knows he’s a liar.”In politics, the more that lies are employed, the more grounds there are for each side to accuse the other of lying.