Today, Americans are terrified of a pandemic virus whose infection rate has spiked up again. With just four percent of the world’s population, the US already has a quarter of the world’s Covid-19 deaths.
China loomed large over the in-person visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark T Esper to New Delhi on October 26-27.
The American project was founded on rank hypocrisies. On the one hand, President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the stirring words in the Declaration of Independence that upheld “these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”, did not free his own slaves (not even Sally Hemings, who bore him six children).
Think about this, almost half of Americans thinks he’s handling this pandemic swimmingly according to a recent CNN poll that puts him closer to 45 percent.
“Extraordinary times require extraordinary solutions”—that is how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi summed up the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic during a video conference on March 30 with the heads of all of India’s embassies and high commissions across the globe.
As the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic shifts from China to the developed West, all too many rich countries are acting selfishly, invoking the “national interest”, by banning exports of vital medical supplies.
The fight in this week’s Democratic primaries may have been about who confronts Donald J Trump in November’s US presidential election, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden.
The G7 summit has been wrapped up with a show of harmony among its member states where none of the participating states raised the concern over the danger of the “Thucydides Trap”,between the US and China, a major cause of the anarchy in the international system, today.
In the late 1980s, without ending the war, foreign troops withdrew from Afghanistan, which prolonged the conflict for three decades.
Protest is back on the front burner. Protesters occupy streets in cities ranging from Hong Kong and Moscow to Khartoum and Algiers.
The Amazon is not on fire. There are fires in the Amazon rainforest, as there are every year in July-September, because this is the dry season.
Donald Trump. Boris Johnson. Marine Le Pen. Norbert Hofer. Are they ignorant? Short-sighted? Populist?
Despite ongoing peace negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, the bloody conflict in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on the country’s people. The recent suicide bombing by the Khorasan branch of the Islamic State (IS-K) at a wedding in Kabul, which killed more than 60 and injured close to 200, is a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s poor security situation. It also shows that the Taliban are not the only armed opposition fuelling the conflict. A US-Taliban peace pact is, therefore, unlikely to bring any respite.
Recent diametrically opposed responses to repression of Muslims by China, India and other Asian countries highlight deep differences among Gulf states that ripple across Asia. The different responses were evident in Gulf reactions to India’s unilateral withdrawal of Kashmir’s autonomy and Qatar’s reversal of its support of China’s clampdown on Turkic Muslims in its troubled, north-western province of Xinjiang.
When she first heard about the infamous extradition bill on March 31 this year, Adrienne, a 24-year-old Hong Kong national, had lost hope.
Accept it or not, President Richard Nixon had contributed to China’s opening-up in the past. President Donald Trump’s strange policy is now contributing to China’s economic gearing-up, and North Korea’s opening-up.
In 2017, it was widely expected that the top leadership position of the Congress Party would be extended to a member of the Gandhi family.
