Sweden has dealt with the global COVID-19 pandemic very differently from the other Nordic countries. All but Sweden are led by women. The female prime ministers in Denmark, Norway and Finland closed down their countries in the middle of March and have dealt with the pandemic in an open, inclusive and democratic way you would […] More
The disastrous numbers produced by the coronavirus crisis in the US have generated a second pandemic, one that will predictably last for just the next six months: the virus of electoral rhetoric focused on blaming an overseas enemy. Whereas the Democrats, clinging to their Cold War nostalgia, still appear to be obsessed by Russia, Republicans […] More
Indonesia has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. At the time of publishing, there have been more than 19,000 confirmed cases and over 1,200 deaths. Due to a lack of testing — just 776 people per 1 million in a country with a population of 268 million — the number of infections is believed […] More
Last October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying US commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib province where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his bodyguards and some of […] More
For at least the past 30 years, the strategy of the Democratic Party in the US has consistently focused solely on winning elections by arguing that its oligarchic loyalties are less servile than those of the Republicans. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the party has never strayed from that orientation, even after repeatedly […] More
Since the beginning of 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has dropped to its lowest point in 14 years. From February to March, Putin’s favorability dropped from 69% to 63%, and his disapproval ratings rose from 30% to 36%. While the Russian president continues to have a net favorability among his citizens, the declining numbers […] More
In 2017, US President Donald Trump’s new administration found itself in a quandary. Should it continue providing weapons for use in Saudi Arabia’s murderous war in Yemen that had been raging for two years? In June 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unexpectedly declared neighboring Qatar an enemy and imposed a blockade. It even […] More
India has an abysmally low percentage of people with access to decent health care. About 300 million Indian citizens live below the poverty line and, for them, medicine is prohibitively expensive. For decades, serious medical conditions have pushed families into poverty and destitution. From 2000 to 2015, the annual national health-care expenditure averaged around 4.00% […] More
