Across America, people are coming out in hordes to protest the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the knee of a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin choked Floyd with his vicious stranglehold, pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for an interminable eight minutes and 46 seconds, even as Floyd […] More
“If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, young, gifted, and black in America, you would choose right now,” Barack Obama told a graduating class at Howard University in Washington DC four years ago, drawing attention to Hansberry’s 1996 collection of plays, interviews and letters that bore a […] More
Poor Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. He currently holds no political office and can’t even circulate in public. In contrast with his Republican rival, US President Donald Trump, he is a mere spectator of the news. Worse, with a raging pandemic now complemented by nationwide violent protests over yet another act of police […] More
Since 2016, the year the British voted to leave the European Union and the US elected trade-war baron Donald Trump, Europe has had its share of political and economic storms. The EU’s lack of unity and coherence and its fragility as a geopolitical institution have never been more obvious. The euro was already under threat […] More
In 1968, German mathematician Dietrich Braess made a rather fascinating observation. When you added an additional road between points A and B, it slowed traffic down rather than speed it up. The Braess paradox, as it is now called, is a counterintuitive observation that has been studied and expanded for over half a century, with […] More
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
