23 November 2020 There’s no hurricane coming, but the windows of downtown Washington are covered with plywood. They were initially boarded up due to fear of street violence during the election, but that fear lingers three weeks after the vote because the restaurateurs and shop-owners (whose premises remain open behind the plywood) think the violence …
18 November 2020 All the usual caveats apply: don’t go out and celebrate, don’t let your guard down, it’s still going to be a long haul. This winter will be “hard”, warned Uğur Şahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, the German company that announced the first effective Covid-19 vaccine only a week ago. It can’t …
15 November 2020 One Hong Kong lawmaker, Claudia Mo, said it was “the death-knell of Hong Kong’s democracy fight.” But she was part of it: one of the fifteen remaining pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council (Legco) who resigned on Thursday in protest at the expulsion of four other democratically elected members of the pseudo-parliament. …
11 November 2020 This time, the truce will last. The 2,000 Russian troops flying into Armenia this week and fanning out to police the ceasefire lines in Nagorno-Karabakh are being sent there for five years renewable, and neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan will challenge them. Armenia is in shock, but what remains of the Armenian enclave …
9 November 2020 Americans should congratulate themselves. Their election system is definitely better than Ethiopia’s. In fact, it works so well that there’s unlikely to be another American civil war. The United States, a federal country with a complex and decrepit voting system, has nevertheless just held a national election despite about a quarter-million Covid-19 …
3 November 2020 By the time you read this you may know more than I do as I write it, but some conclusions about the US election are already certain. First, this has been essentially a re-run of the 2016 presidential election. The final Electoral College tally and therefore the presidency may still be in …
2 November 2020 Almost completely obscured by the blanket global coverage of the US election, they are having one in Myanmar (Burma) too. The outcome is even more a foregone conclusion, although in this case it will confirm the existing government in power. But it is only by condoning a great crime that democracy there …
28 October 2020 The month-old war between Azerbaijan and Armenia is so low on everybody else’s list of concerns that when Azerbaijan won the war last Monday morning, hardly anybody in the media elsewhere even noticed. Shortly after 8am local time on Monday, Azeri troops gained control of the road through the Lachin Pass. That …
21 October 2020 The young Nigerians who were protesting at Lekki Toll Plaza in Lagos on Tuesday night were not the African touring company of ‘Les Misérables’. Lekki is one of the poshest suburbs of Lagos, full of gated communities, and most of the protesters were literate, media-savvy youths who reeked of urban cool. The …
19 October 2020 The British pantomime is a traditional Christmas entertainment in which stock characters face imaginary dangers and audience participation is encouraged (“He’s behind you!”), but the play never frightens the children and it always has a happy ending. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could be a pantomime character: he blusters and rages, he …