President López Obrador has failed spectacularly to manage the pandemic and its economic repercussions.
Tag: coronavirus
When Lesotho recently discovered its first coronavirus case, it marked the arrival of the pandemic in every country in Africa. Already, 70,000 people have been infected across the continent and the World Health Organisation warns of upwards of 190,000 deaths in Africa this year from COVID-19. The economic impacts are also forecast to be devastating: […]
PARIS — The surprise announcement of a massive pact between France and Germany to lead Europe’s response to the COVID-19 crisis marks a historic agreement, writes of Paris-based daily Les Echos. Germany’s decision to accept the principle of a common debt for European countries, signals the birth of a new union of solidarity, which is […]
Welcome to Wednesday, where the fighting in Gaza intensifies despite international calls for ceasefire, COVID deaths hit a new record in India and a flooded Italian village resurfaces. Le Monde“s correspondent Louis Imbert reports from the West Bank where more and more young supporters of the ruling Fatah party are joining the clashes with Israeli […]
Large cities like Buenos Aires are prepping for life after the lockdown and anticipating changes, among other things, in the ways people commute.
Taiwan’s success in containing the coronavirus is certainly cause for celebration, and to really emphasize the point, farmers in one agricultural region decided this week that it’s high time to break out the… watermelons? After a string of six straight days with no new confirmed coronavirus cases, a group of farmers in Changhua, in central […]
Preventing an epidemic like the coronavirus doesn’t just require a robust human healthcare system, it also demands a full rethinking of our relationship with the animal kingdom. Just a few examples of what we need: a crackdown on the illicit “wet markets“” trade of exotic animals, where the virus may have originated; veterinary medicine needs […]
Germany has the resources to weather the storm, but not everyone in Europe is convinced that’s a good thing.
Colombia is a prime example of how overspending and indebtedness leave little room for error, and why it’s important to take a new approach moving forward.
Beyond public support for medical workers, the French are very critical of the management of the pandemic by their leaders compared to other countries.
Viruses spread, mutate and then become deadly because humans destroy the areas where wild animals live. We must learn from this, once the coronavirus pandemic is contained.
It is, of course, inevitable that governments’ stay-at-home orders and other emergency measures to contain the novel coronavirus would generate differences of opinion. And yet, even a few weeks ago, it was hard to imagine that it would take as ugly a turn as what’s happening right now in the U.S. state of Michigan, where […]
The coronavirus pandemic has been both a boost and a challenge for delivery services like Chowbus, which specialize in Chinese fare.
Humans have been greeting each others with handshakes for thousands of years. Are we witnessing the end to pressing the flesh, and giving some skin? “I don’t think we should shake hands ever again,” declared Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the key members of the US coronavirus task force, in a Wall Street Journal podcast. […]
As COVID-19 lingers, protective masks are recommended and even mandatory in certain places. But our faces are also our windows to the world, and covering them creates serious new obstacles across our societies.
Whether or not they were looking for it, the COVID-19 crisis has given epidemiologists bonafide public power. “At this point, if Drosten says it is too early, that carries as much weight as Merkel saying it,” quipped German economist Marcel Fratzscher about his country’s top epidemiologist Christian Drosten and top politician Angela Merkel. There is […]
Latin American countries are, for the most part, appreciative of Beijing’s donations of much needed medical supplies. But the goodwill isn’t guaranteed to last forever.
Across the globe, swamped hospitals and shelter-in-place measures have impacted people’s access to healthcare for any number of non-COVID-19 issues. One of them is abortion, a time sensitive procedure that is also — even the best of times — both emotionally and politically charged. Now, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, some countries have […]
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The Meaning Of A Haircut
We have all, at some point, thought about the very first thing we’d do once lockdown restrictions start to lift. Going for a cup of coffee, dining out, meeting friends in the flesh (not on Zoom). But there’s one item on our list of mundane things we took for granted that we’re reminded of each […]
The word krisis was coined by the Greeks three millennia ago, meaning “turning point in a disease.” The meaning of course has evolved and expanded since, even if our pandemic has brought the word full circle to its ancient ramifications. In Greece’s more recent history, turning points have come in different forms, at rapid-fire pace […]
Every fictional plague has an origin story, and an ending — happy or otherwise. We hereby issue a pandemic spoiler alert!
Egyptian students won’t attend in-person classes again until September. In the case of most private schools, there won’t be any refunds either to the mostly middle-class families.
As the new pandemic reality requires radical rethinking about how we live our lives, one hint of where we may be going could appear this summer in a neighborhood near you. The re-opening of bars and restaurants coinciding with warm weather is pushing city officials to reallocate the space that diners and motorists can occupy. […]
Today, you may read about lockdowns being loosened in COVID-19 hotspots like France or Spain or the U.K. But you may also discover that Germany, widely lauded for keeping infection rates relatively low, has seen an uptick in their number of coronavirus cases since they relaxed certain social distancing restrictions. Turn farther to the East, […]
Welcome to Tuesday, where deadly warfare erupts in Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Indian COVID variant is “cause for concern,” and NASA gets its hands on some seriously old space dust. Le Monde“s Joan Tilouine also explains how the initial excitement surrounding Beijing’s so-called “Stadium Diplomacy” in Africa has turned. • Israel responds to Palestinian rockets with […]
The pandemic is prompting changes in politics, culture and personal conduct. Could these shifts be glimpses of a better, post-pandemic society?
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Bracing For A Second Wave Next Winter
PARIS — The rate of transmission and death toll of the coronavirus finally seem to be slowing, and various national and local lockdown measures are beginning to loosen. In a best-case scenario, both commerce and public confidence pick back up and social distancing measures help the virus to fade away by the summer. But even […]
Last year 1.5 billion international tourist arrivals were recorded globally. In 2020, with borders closed and airplanes grounded, the tourism industry has been decimated and its recovery could take years. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development anticipates a 45% to 70% decline in the tourism economy — amounting to losses between $295-$430 billion for […]
Ageism at its most inhumane.
Tucked away in a isolated corner of Germany, the owners of a rural restaurant have somehow managed to make ends meet for 17 years. But that was before the coronavirus outbreak.
Welcome to Friday, where a shooting at a favela in Rio kills 25, the Pfizer jab shows promising results against COVID variants, and pizza vending machines arrive in Rome. We also look at how central banks are finally starting to take an interest in cryptocurrencies. • COVID-19: Pfizer vs. variants, pandemic Olympics: Two different studies […]
Known as UBI, Universal Basic Income has been a dream of progressive economists. Now it is effectively written into many COVID-19 relief packages. But it may turn out to have staying power well beyond.
After weeks of denial and manipulation, China wanted to play the role of a caring superpower. But something about its soft-power push went awry.
Charles de Gaulle was the first world leader to truly understand the power of television, using regular presidential broadcasts as a way to circumvent French legislators, labor unions and other levers of democratic influence.
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Sweden’s Economy v. World On Lockdown
Not surprisingly, early indicators point to a less bleak future for Sweden’s still-open economy than for that of its European counterparts. A recent study by Swedbank shows that private consumption in Sweden shrank 17% between April 6 to April 19 compared to the same period last year, while revenue from hotel and restaurants was down […]
We talk about how the COVID-19 pandemic is upending so many aspects of our lives, yet it is foremost a story about death. Every day in this strange new normal, death counts close to home and around the world are updated, displayed, analyzed; figures are given, curves are drawn, graphs are made, allowing all of […]
Airline operators and manufacturers are taking one on the nose and scrambling to contain the fallout from a crisis that appeared out of the blue.
From the downfall of the European Union to the end of capitalism, grand political theories of a post-pandemic world loom large. These are times where talk of watersheds and historic shifts suddenly can’t be brushed away as mere sensationalism. Yet rather than trying to identify what will change, it may be more useful to gauge […]
Vietnam and Slovakia are among those that have stood out in the response, though the apparent reasons vary.
The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated tensions between Beijing and Washington. It’s time that cooler heads prevail, and Germany has just the right person for the job.