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As dusk fell on June 15, a bloody clash broke out between Chinese and Indian soldiers in the Galwan Valley on the northwest China-India border, where a tributary of the Indus flows westward from Aksai Chin to Ladakh. In line with China’s recent expansionist policy elsewhere, its military had...
Around the world, the news agenda is dominated by the coronavirus and the policy responses to it. Naturally, most of the attention is paid to things like how many people are dying and when the various lockdowns can be lifted. However, in every industry, there is a story to be told about the impact...
Donald J. Trump secured the presidency of the United States through a victory in a contentious election. His win was owed to the US Electoral College — not the popular vote. This was the case when George W. Bush won the electoral college over Al Gore’s popular win in 2000 that triggered a...
Economists like to think of the wreckage caused by stock market downturns, widespread bankruptcies and corporate downsizing as “creative destruction.” As it destroys the old and the dysfunctional, the capitalist system continually spurs innovation, much as a forest fire prepares the ground for...
With West Texas Intermediate futures trading in negative territory for the first time in history, it seemed the market had finally come to terms with what experts had long warned: The world is running out of oil storage. With human movement restricted due to the coronavirus pandemic, aviation...
You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up...
“Can we please go back to talking about Brexit?” For the past few weeks, I got used to seeing this message on Twitter at least once a day, breaking the monopoly of news about the novel coronavirus. For some, it was a joke, half-nostalgically taking us back to the...
A lot has changed since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China, in December last year. While much remains unknown about the new coronavirus, COVID-19 has since spread rapidly from its origin in China to every corner of the world except Antarctica. Unlike previous health crises...
Amid the debate surrounding COVID-19, the rhetoric around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the United States and India is the best example of the populism of our times. Earlier on in the pandemic, anecdotal evidence from France led US President Donald Trump to proclaim that all the patients should try...
Fear, in the globalized sense of the word, had largely dissipated ever since the height of the Cold War, when the world stood by as the two superpowers stared each other down with nuclear weapons. Largely absent since the days of brinkmanship seen during the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile...
Until recently, globalization was heralded as the major engine of global economic growth and, particularly, of the dramatic reduction in inter-country inequality. Globalization was largely seen as a win-win mechanism for both developed and developing countries. Central to globalization has been...
