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Following the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on November 15, 2020, media reporting around the world has entered into fanfare mode. Western and Chinese media in particular are reporting on the free trade deal through the narrow lens of US-China competition,...
In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden endlessly insisted on the idea of “unity.” He repeated the word nine times. In the various media’s account of the event, commentators endlessly repeated a different word, one that Biden himself cited when he said: “This is our historic moment...
In 2020, 24.3 million people, or 80% of the population in Yemen, were at risk of hunger and disease, with 14.4 million in acute need of assistance. A political solution is necessary to end the war and achieve lasting peace. This may take time. The international community must provide the...
“It’s the economy, stupid,” a catchphrase coined in the 1990s by American political strategist James Carville, made George H. W. Bush — who won the First Gulf War for Americans — a one-term president, catapulting Bill Clinton into the White House. As Donald Trump’s one-term presidency...
As the transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden takes place, pundits have begun offering political obituaries of prominent personalities associated with the outgoing administration. Mike Pompeo, for example. At 57, his career may not be over, but there is a sense in which, were it to be revived...
Every publication has a worldview. Each cultivates a style of thought, ideology or philosophy designed to comfort the expectations of its readers and to confirm a shared way of perceiving the world around them. Even Fair Observer has a worldview, in which, thanks to the diversity of its...
When I was growing up in Germany in the 1960s, during the holiday seasons, both Christmas and Easter, one of the highlights on television was the reruns of “Don Camillo and Peppone.” These are movies that involve the adventures of a Catholic priest and a communist mayor, taking place in a...
In a world of ever-expanding wealth inequality, those who possess significant wealth today tend to become tomorrow’s hyperwealthy. The aristocracy of hyperwealth has always existed, but it was formerly limited to rare individuals whose family history or luck in the industrial world endowed them...
Turkey deepened its cooperation with Qatar during the blockade imposed by the Arab quartet in 2017, when the tiny emirate was most vulnerable and highly reliant on outside assistance for food supplies and security against perceived threats from its neighbors as well as the threat of an internal...
With a new US administration about to be inaugurated, it is prudent to look at the dynamics and variables shaping the future of one of the world’s most important relationships, that between Washington and Beijing. President Donald Trump came into office looking to take a more aggressive approach...
Since hindsight is always 20/20, and now we thankfully have 2020 in hindsight, it’s time to celebrate. In particular, to celebrate a commercially irrelevant but wondrous technology that might allow humans to fly through the air under our own power, like birds. This is the stuff of dreams. One...
