When the COVID-19 pandemic is dissected in the 2020 presidential election debates, Donald Trump will be at a disadvantage. The coronavirus has killed over 100,000 Americans and maimed thousands more. The caveat is that deaths per capita, rather than total deaths, better measure national failure, and by that metric the US fares better than Belgium, […] More
In his infinite ignorance, Donald Trump has invited world leaders to the White House for a face-to-face meeting at the end of June. Unlike the other countries in the G7, the United States has yet to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. One of the hotspots that the White House itself has identified is none other than Washington, DC. […] More
US President Donald Trump, who tweeted more than 11,000 times in the first two years of his presidency, is very upset with Twitter. Earlier this week Trump tweeted complaints about mail-in ballots, alleging voter fraud – a familiar Trump falsehood. Twitter attached a label to two of his tweets with links to sources that fact–checked […] More
Morocco is committed to finding opportunities to restructure and redirect its economy to be better prepared for other potential calamities, such as the coronavirus pandemic. The economy is already facing a downturn due to drought, which may result in as much as a 42% decline in cereal production for 2019-20. However, given advances in the agricultural sector […] More
In 2014, early in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term, the world was abuzz with India’s demographic dividend. More than half of India’s population was under the age of 24, GDP was growing at 7% to 8% annually in spite of corruption and high inflation, and Modi had won a decisive mandate in national […] More
In March 2015, the unexpected newly elected president of Sri Lanka, Maithripala Sirisena, stated that the national anthem could be sung in Tamil at official and institutional events. For anyone alien to life on the teardrop island, this announcement may have come as a surprise since, after all, Tamil and Sinhala are the two official […] More
In May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Britain to return the Chagos Archipelago, a cluster of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, an island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. The resolution endorsed an International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) advisory opinion that had been […] More
For much of the past decade, radical right-wing populism in the Netherlands has largely been associated with Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV). Following in the footsteps of the late Pim Fortuyn, Wilders established himself as one of Western Europe’s most outspoken promoters of anti-Islamic rhetoric, whose often outrageous and inflammatory rants exerted […] More
