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The outbreak spreading on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers, reveals yet another victim of the coronavirus pandemic: the American military’s ability to patrol the world’s oceans and deter or fight wars.

Warships and submarines, even more than cruise ships, are breeding grounds for viruses. Crew members are packed into narrow confines, working and sleeping within inches of one another.

According to official figures released today, 893 U.S. military personnel across all the services have tested positive, as have 306 Defense Department civilian workers, 256 dependents, and 95 contractors. Of them, 85 have been hospitalized; five are dead.

A lot of foreign travelers have found themselves in dramatic situations over the last few months, sometimes because they waited too late in the global pandemic game to go home due to ignorance, stubbornness, or being lied to by travel agents or cruise ships. But Daniel was simply jumping through the exhausting bureaucratic hoops necessary to live and work legally in the country he’s called home for seven years. 

The endless paperwork involved in moving to another country has long been a slow-motion nightmare for most foreign nationals, but all the more so now that the coronavirus has forced border and, more importantly, embassy closures. Many expats, immigrants and asylum seekers are finding themselves in a state of legal limbo with no certainty in sight.

It’s quite common for foreign contract workers in Myanmar, like Daniel, to cross the border every couple of months for a quick visa run, sometimes for months or even years on end while they await their residency cards (the equivalent of a U.S. green card). Daniel’s process has been held up by red tape and a landlord who won’t sign his final paperwork. It’s been six years already. Like most foreign nationals, he’s nervous the virus will result in immigration policy changes that might force him to go “home.” His current health insurance wouldn’t cover him in the U.S., though. “And I have no ‘home’ to go back to,” Daniel says. “My whole life is in Myanmar. I have nothing in the U.S.”

Internal memos and emails sent late January and obtained by Foreign Policy detail how U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) missions in southern Africa are grappling with low morale and staff shortages due to illness and that at least three USAID members of staff in the region have died from COVID-19 as well as several staff members from local partner organizations. 

The internal communications reflect how rapidly the virus is spreading in the developing world and presents an urgent challenge to the Biden administration

in the final months of the Trump administration, despite rapidly rising case numbers, U.S. officials posted in sub-Saharan Africa said they hadn’t heard any further guidance about when—or whether—they may be permitted to leave their posts. 

There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza

it’s a beautiful short film and a very weird advertisement: Who would have thought that a bunch of Muscovites bickering about the end of communism would be a natural pitch for pizza?

In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.

The capacity to manufacture drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients has moved from the United States and Europe to developing countries in Asia where costs are lower and environmental regulations more relaxed. According to some widely cited estimates, the United States now imports virtually all of certain common antibiotics and over-the-counter pain medications from China, along with a high percentage of generic drugs used to treat HIV, depression, Alzheimer’s, and other ailments, and many of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used to make other medicines. Constriction of supply chains due to coronavirus-related shutdowns in China, further disruptions in global transportation networks, and a spike in worldwide demand for essential drugs could endanger the health of American citizens.

If trade were suspended due to a tense confrontation or an actual armed conflict, the United States might find it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to ramp up and sustain production of arms, munitions, weapons platforms, communications equipment, and other military systems.

Even before the current crisis, many companies had begun to diversify production away from China, shifting a portion of their manufacturing capacity to other countries. This movement was driven by the need to avoid U.S. tariffs, but also by longer-term trends, including rising Chinese wages and technological developments that are making it both desirable and cost-effective to shorten some supply chains, bringing producers closer to final consumers.

has also illustrated that national governments remain the primary actors

the world is likely to see a different, more limited version of global integration than the one we have known over the past three decades

Before the pandemic, global goods trade was still rising, but relative to the total output of the global economy, the share of trade is lower today than it was before the financial crisis.

Scientists first produced Captagon, the brand name of the drug fenethylline, in the 1960s to treat depression and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Two decades later, the World Health Organization banned the substance due its high potential for addiction, abuse, and other adverse health effects. But counterfeit Captagon—which is sometimes just a cocktail of amphetamines with no fenethylline—remains in demand on the black market in the Middle East.

pills intercepted in Salerno arrived on three ships from Latakia, a Syrian port, and Italian police quickly announced that the Islamic State was responsible for their production and shipment—allegedly to fund its global terrorism operations.

Global media outlets disseminated the information provided by the Italian police without questioning it, replicating misinformation without considering how a scattered group of Islamic State members could pull off such an operation—but the truth is, they probably didn’t

the predicament facing cocaine smugglers, as the global pandemic has increased scrutiny on them and disrupted their smuggling and distribution networks. But it also highlights their flexible approach to their trade, which has kept business booming even as many of the world’s legal sectors have ground to a halt.

OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers.

In March and April, Spain seized over 14 tons of cocaine in inbound shipments — a figure six times higher than the same period the previous year, said Manuel Montesinos, the deputy director of Customs surveillance at the Spanish Taxation Agency. “We are very struck by the frenetic pace,” Montesinos said. “Almost every day we receive alerts of detections of suspicious operations.”

Somalia has been spinning on a crisis carousel: war, famine, terrorism, climate stress. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is set to steer the country towards another hemorrhaging of human life. Even with a youth population above 70 percent, the virus will likely compound Somalia’s chronic medley of miseries. With each passing day, an uneasy question looms large: If the pandemic has left such death and upheaval in its wake in the world’s most powerful countries, what impact will it have on one of the world’s most fragile?

a psychological readiness for catastrophe. Extreme violence has long been a fact of daily life in Mogadishu, under siege by one of the deadliest terrorist groups in Africa, al-Shabab, which, by conservative estimates, has killed more than 3,000 people in the past five years and wounded tens of thousands in the past decade. Somalis, often touted for their resilience amid unrelenting adversity, are no strangers to mass loss of life.

As of Monday, 1,054 infections—out of a miniscule testing pool—and 51 deaths have been confirmed. The true spread is doubtless far worse.