This week, the Chinese People’s Congress in Beijing, the regime’s rubber-stamp parliament, will pass a special law banning subversion, separatism, acts of foreign interference and ‘terrorism’ in Hong Kong.

The current levels of income support could not be sustained long term without a significantly higher rate of tax.

A few dozen volunteers and mercenaries tried to land on the Venezuelan coast near Caracas a week ago. Six were killed, all the rest were arrested.

There are many clever people working on all the problems that threaten our future, and that for some of them at least, solutions will arrive in time.

Other East Asian countries that had experience of SARS understood the seriousness of the WHO warning and promptly began diligent testing, tracing, and isolation of infected persons.

Last year saw an unprecedented upsurge in public concern about climate change—Australian wildfires, record floods all over the place, Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg—but all that has now been pushed aside by the coronavirus. Global heating and its associated disasters will kill far more people in the long run, but COVID-19 is killing them now.

Donald Trump downplayed the threat as long as he could, then became a last-minute advocate of lockdown. He has now moved on to being the liberator of the American people from lockdown, without any contact tracing.

Fauci has become a familiar figure standing beside Donald Trump at media briefings, never openly contradicting him, but subtly trying to steer him away from his worst ideas. It’s a humiliating position to be in.

U.S. President Donald Trump has an election coming up in six months, and he will lose it if the economy has not recovered by then.

Western countries did not use the ample time they had to put a similar system in place. They didn’t even stock up on masks, ventilators and protective clothing.

'Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis,' as Machiavelli allegedly said 500 years ago. So is what we are seeing in Hungary now the tip of the iceberg?

Achieving herd immunity requires 60 per cent-70 per cent of the population to have had the disease—and with this particular coronavirus, about one or two percent of those people will die.

Or at least they should. COVID-19 is certainly not going to change the world forever, but it is going to change quite a few things, in some cases for a long time.

Collective action and government protection for the old and the poor will no longer be viewed as dangerous radicalism, even in the United States.

Unless this particular coronavirus fails to cause a second wave of infections next winter, we will probably be stuck in lockdown most of the time until an effective vaccine becomes widely available.

In every country, we have collectively decided, without even an argument, that we care more about the lives of our fellow citizens than we do about the damned economy.

He probably just prefers a policy that does not cripple the economy, and doesn’t understand the implications, writes columnist Gwynne Dyer.

That Israel could be a democratic state where every citizen has an equal say or an apartheid state where most Arabs are subjects, not citizens, but it can’t be both.

Folklore, superstitions, and old wives’ tales abound in every culture, but beliefs about the power of jinbu are unique to China, and explain why eating specific wild animals plays a major role in Chinese medicine.

History does not repeat, but it does have patterns, and there are disturbing similarities.

Maesaiah Thabane, wife of Prime Minister Thomas Thabane and therefore First Lady of Lesotho, is charged with ordering the murder of his previous wife three years ago, and he’s accused of being her accomplice.

The whistleblowers are among our last remaining checks on the contemptuous ease with which those who control the information seek to manipulate the rest of us.

This could end up as a major war, and since Turkey can easily block Russian ships heading for the Mediterranean, Russian victory would not be quick or easy. But they would win in the end, as they always do.