Coronavirus News (193)

‘That’s Ridiculous.’ How America’s Coronavirus Response Looks Abroad. From lockdowns to testing, we showed people around the world the facts and figures on how the U.S. has handled the pandemic. ......... The United States leads the world in Covid-19 deaths, nearing 150,000 lost lives. The unemployment figures brought on by the pandemic are mind-boggling. The Trump administration’s slow and haphazard response has been widely criticized. ..............  Many advanced economies, from Germany to Singapore, directly supplemented salaries to save jobs. Other nations with fewer resources started mass testing at the first sign of an outbreak. Many countries mandated universal lockdowns — and successfully flattened the curve. In some parts of Europe, you could be fined for straying too far from your home. And Vietnam, a nation of 95 million people, has not seen a single Covid-19 death.    

 

China and America Are Heading Toward Divorce For 40 years the two countries had an unconscious economic coupling. .......   They know that as long as you’re president, America will be in turmoil. For Xi, that means we’re a less formidable economic rival, and for Vlad, that means we’re a less attractive democratic model for his people. They also both know that as long as you’re president the U.S. will never be able to galvanize a global coalition of allies against them, which is what China fears most on trade, human rights and Covid-19 and Russia on Ukraine and Syria. .........  “If Biden is elected, I think this could be more dangerous for China, because he will work with allies to target China, whereas Trump is destroying U.S. alliances.” ........ after 40 years of being one couple, two systems, because China badly overreached and America badly underperformed. .........  the U.S.-China partnership forged between 1979 and 2019 delivered a lot of prosperity to a lot of people and a lot of relative peace to the world — and, baby, we will miss it when it’s gone. ............  as Trump himself put it in a tweet last week, the U.S. has the option “of a complete decoupling from China.” ..........  China has become more aggressive in projecting its power into the South China Sea .......  it is imposing a new national security law to curtail longstanding freedoms in Hong Kong; it’s stepped up its bullying of Taiwan, taken a very aggressive approach toward India and intensified its internment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang .........  it takes about 22 hours on Amtrak to go from New York to Chicago, while it takes 4.5 hours to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, slightly farther apart ...........  It’s that we have reduced investments in the true sources of our strength — infrastructure, education, government-funded scientific research, immigration and the right rules to incentivize productive investment and prevent excessive risk-taking. And we have stopped leveraging our greatest advantage over China — that we have allies who share our values and China only has customers who fear its wrath. .............   “I don’t know if the Chinese are taking America seriously anymore. They are happy to just let us keep damaging ourselves. ........ China respects one thing only: leverage. Today, we have too little and China has too much.

The Death of Engagement The policy of "engagement" has defined U.S.-China relations for almost a half century. It didn't have to end this way. ........  In 1967, as race riots spread across the United States and as the Vietnam War raged on, an astounding 70 percent of Americans agreed on one thing: the greatest threat to U.S. security was the People’s Republic of China. At the time, China was in the throes of one of the most violent, anti-democratic upheavals of the century, The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Americans feared that the contagion of Mao’s “people’s war” would spread from Indochina around the world.  So, it was surprising when, against this backdrop, then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon issued a call for amity in the pages of Foreign Affairs. 

Churchill The Failure: The Paradoxical Truth About The Best And Worst Leaders  Churchill, in his own words, “hated” Indians, describing them as “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” .........  He alienated the Conservative leadership and marginalized himself so far on the extreme right that he was accused of attempting to become “an English Mussolini.” ....... Churchill’s attitude towards India did not change when he became Prime Minister. He presided over – and actively prevented any efforts to alleviate – the catastrophic 1943 Bengal famine, which killed 3 million Indians. When Churchill’s India Secretary and childhood friend Leo Amery asked him to do something, Churchill laughed about the prospect of shrinking a population that bred “like rabbits.” A horrorstruck Amery wrote that when it came to India, there wasn’t “much difference between [Churchill’s] outlook and Hitler’s.” ....... only Churchill would have kept fighting in May 1940. In the right circumstances, there is no one you’d rather be led by than Winston Churchill. In the wrong ones, you’d rather have anyone else.   

Coronavirus-Linked Hunger Tied To 10,000 Child Deaths Each Month The side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are pushing hungry communities around the world over the edge.