what does monopoly do and what do oligopolistic structures do to the domestic political structure?

properly understood liberalism clearly isn't premised on the absence of the state, its premised on a well-ordered set of relationships between individuals, the law and various types of representation. That structure is not necessarily robust if economic power becomes monolithic. There are ways of taming that by way of corporatism, in which you have an organized representation of economic interests. But you can also imagine systems in which it can become a sort of destructive set of flywheels of extremely explosive dynamics of gigantic interest groups contending with each other more or less in an unmediated direct form interest on interest.

a clash within the one-party state of different interests, of agglomerations of technology and capital, of different party factions

It's quite difficult to describe the Chinese regime in categories that are at all familiar without reducing it hopelessly and just failing to recognize its complexity

This sort of apocalyptic thinking of a history that's going to end with some sort of big bang, or some terrible ghastly discreditable whimper, rather than just facing up to reality in which the world is different and America's position is not what it was in 1945. Which is not after all the end of the world.

there are deeply intelligent, obviously brilliant political and legal theorists working in China, trying to articulate and make sense of the logic of this emerging power. One of the sources that they go to – and this has emerged from the tireless work of many translators of recent Chinese political writing and international relations thought is -- is a German political and legal theorist called Carl Schmitt.

We were fought to a stalemate in Korea. Vietnam was a debacle. And one of the key anchors of the ultimate demise of Soviet Union is, after all, an alliance with China. And in 1989 at the moment, as it were, where the chips are falling and the Warsaw pact is disintegrating in Eastern Europe, we have Tiananmen Square, the Communist Party basically giving notice that this regime change will not extend to them.

you can immediately see why Chinese scholars seized on precisely this logic for thinking through the emergence of Chinese power in the context of what they would diagnose as American empire

they also see in Schmitt a theorist of China's own potential empire, a zone of influence and power that would create its own structures of incorporation, its own norms. Given from China, defined by China, set and ultimately rooted in Chinese power, radiating out from East Asia, encompassing other states.

“One Nation, Two Systems” was precisely a kind of Schmittian vision of an overarching Chinese empire, with the pluralism that's contained within that. Safely contained with the acknowledgement that this is about China, under the leadership and the hegemony of the CCP, tolerating two systems. Of course, that isn't what we're seeing

It seems to me that there could be a horrifying originality to what they're doing. After all the tech dimension of what China's able to do now in terms of surveillance is beyond the wildest dreams of any previous authoritarian regime.

It too easily slides out of consciousness that the Chinese regime undertook what Foucauldians would call one of the most grotesque, grandiose, and very violent political experiments in history, the one-child policy. It pursued that towards the Han population. That it’s then also capable of taking those kinds of techniques and applying them to resistant population like the Uighurs or Tibetans or the Mongolians, I don't think it’s surprising. It's the same toolkit. In the eighties, it was ferocious in its intrusiveness, monitoring women's menstrual cycles, forced abortions. This stands alone. No one's ever done that before on that scale. It’s quite mind-blowing and too easily consigned to the history books.

Perhaps the common denominator is simply control and this being a matter of the highest possible political stakes. Not to be able to control this virus would be a far more serious blow to the prestige and legitimacy of a regime which has those kinds of pretensions than it is to the Trump administration in the U.S., which in the end just shrugs

he has one of the most hard-nosed answers to liberalism. He insists upon understanding politics as a distinction between friend and foe, friend and enemy. He insists that legal orders have real foundations in space and in power, in the taking of a territory, fundamentally. That they therefore have limits and necessarily have limits, that they define insiders and outsiders. That structures which are truly comprehensive threatened to emerge in the course of the 20th century

I think that ought to force us to reconsider this notion that the Cold War ended with us winning as it did in Europe. It didn't in Asia, and Korea feels the force of that, Japan feels the force of that, and the United States is now coming to terms with it too.

“We want to move Africa away from this colonial economic model of perpetually being an exporter of primary commodities for processing elsewhere,”

goods traded within Africa were more processed than the raw materials exported from the continent to China, India, Europe and other major trading partners

“Policymakers have understood that, although trade on the continent is limited, this is value-added trade,” he said. “This is where the jobs are coming from, as opposed to trade with the rest of the world, which is mostly commodities.”

Jeffrey Peprah, chief executive of Volkswagen, Ghana, said he hoped eventually to export cars assembled in Accra to other west African countries.

For the agreement to work, one western diplomat said the free trade zone must benefit producers in smaller, poorer countries as well as those in more industrialised parts of the continent. Many countries saw the free trade area as a way of boosting their exports but few had embraced the corollary that they would need to import more, the diplomat said.

two-thirds are sport utility vehicles, with the highest valued being a 2019 Land Rover Range Rover destine to Guinea which they valued at $114,175. The newest vehicle recovered was a 2020 Maserati Ghibli, destined to Jordan valued at $78,485.

The world now has to figure out how to deal with the permanency of the “one world, two systems” problem, meaning a world in which China is led by the state and the west is to a great or lesser extent led by markets. I suspect that one way things will evolve is that the US will start looking a bit more like China, with more public sector involvement in the economy and a proper industrial policy (China received this from us, in any case, so that’s not a bad thing).

more focus on localism,

Many emerging diseases, like those listed above, are zoönoses – diseases transferred from other vertebrates. Their origins can usually be traced to wildlife. They may have stayed on, unnoticed, in the wild and never made the species jump to infect us if a stable ecosystem had been left undisturbed

The urban push into the forest forces bat populations to colonise human spaces and increases their vulnerability – and ours.

Urbanisation provides new roosts, new sources of food and new company. Bats are sociable creatures. They form lasting relationships with home, and their urban circle of friends may embrace species that won’t roost together in the wild. And this commingling means a richer, more diversified stew of bat-borne viruses.

bats don’t get sick. Not as often as they should, considering the range of viruses they harbour

When a bat flies, its metabolic rate rises to meet the exorbitant energy demand of flight, and its body temperature spikes to a high fever. In all mammals, fever upticks the immune process and slows viral replication. As the only mammal capable of sustained flight, the bat has evolved this pattern of spiking body temperature. The benefit is a more efficient immune system.

Bats also spend a great deal of time in torpor – a state of suspended animation, when the body’s temperature drops. Was it this that encouraged viruses to co-evolve the ability to flourish across a wide range of temperatures?

Coronaviruses are 30 per cent of the healthy bat’s virome. They cause diseases in other species – diarrhoeas and dysenteries; respiratory infections in cattle, dogs and swine; even peritonitis in cats. But before 2002, the worst illness they gave us humans was the common cold. Then, in 2002, SARS emerged. It had a death rate of 10 per cent. What had changed?

Words like “coincidental” and “fortuitous” have no place in the narrative of an emerging disease. Instead, we must look for the motive force, the driver that brought about disease. Southeast Asia has lost 30 per cent of its forests in recent years. The deforested land is intensively cultivated. Urban growth is invasive. This abrupt proximity between humans and bats allows greater exposure to the viruses shed in bat saliva and guano, and provides an environment conducive to a rapidly diversifying spectrum of viruses. And since bat coronaviruses cause infections in domesticated species, intermediate hosts are aplenty.

when there is a spillover, humans are immunologically naïve to the virus. This results in a virulent infection, and the virus quickly adapts to rapid spread between humans.

At present, there are thousands of coronaviruses circulating in bats. Just seven of them have declared themselves in humans. As crowding increases, more may emerge. Can we predict what the next one will be like?

The West has long jeered at Asia and Africa as “virus machines”. Such a label is deeply offensive to more than half the people on this planet, besides being scientifically untrue. Viruses are everywhere. Asia and Africa have been historically impoverished by European nations, either through genocide or colonisation. Disease was driven by conquest in the past, and racism in science is rooted in that memory. The language of science often echoes that inequality of power, and, thankfully, we’re growing more sensitive to it.

Disease is driven by capitalism today: the forests of Asia, Africa, Central and South Americas are enslaved to richer nations to produce goods that serve few and bankrupt millions.

this has been one of the driest years in the last three decades for Chihuahua, the Mexican border state responsible for sending the bulk of the water Mexico owes. Its farmers have rebelled, worried that losing any more water will rob them of a chance for a healthy harvest next year.“These tensions, these tendencies, are already there, and they’re just made so much worse by climate change,” said Christopher Scott, a professor of water resources policy at the University of Arizona. “They are in a fight for their lives, because no water, no agriculture; no agriculture, no rural communities.”

Since February, when federal forces first occupied the dam to ensure water deliveries to the United States continued, activists in Chihuahua have burned government buildings, destroyed cars and briefly held a group of politicians hostage. For weeks, they’ve blocked a major railroad used to ferry industrial goods between Mexico and the United States.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has repeatedly bent to President Trump’s demands on immigration, has vowed that his country will make good on its water obligations to the United States — whether the state of Chihuahua likes it or not.

Mr. Velderrain, 42, said he never saw himself as the type of person who would lead hundreds over a hill to overwhelm a group of soldiers protecting a cache of automatic weapons. But there he was in a video posted on Facebook, escorting a Mexican general out of the Boquilla Dam on the day he led the takeover.

With the intensity of the drought in Chihuahua this year, Mexico has fallen far behind on its water shipments to the United States. It now has to send more than 50 percent of its average annual water payment in a matter of weeks. The Mexican government insists it will still comply, despite the takeover of the dam, which spans the Conchos River, a major tributary of the Rio Grande. But some Texans have their doubts.

The treaty doesn’t punish either side for shirking its duties but, eager to avoid conflict, Mexico is scrambling to find a way to meet its water obligations as the deadline nears. One of the likeliest solutions is that Mexico will hand over a significant amount of the water it owns in reservoirs, normally used by more than a dozen Mexican cities. In exchange, Mexico has asked the United States to lend it drinking water for those cities, if Mexico ends up running out.

Mexico’s need for water has grown since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, as more people settled in the country’s dry border region and agricultural production ramped up to satisfy American consumers.

“I myself will migrate if I don’t have anywhere to work here.”

According to a draft version of the bill, mandatory paid leave for childbirth, weddings, baptism and bereavement will be scrapped, as will menstrual leave for women. Work overtime will be increased to four hours a day, and mandatory severance benefits paid by employers will be reduced, from 32 times monthly wages, to 19 times monthly wages.

only high-risk investments required to obtain a permit or carry out an environmental impact assessment

Restrictions placed on foreign participation in some sectors will be eased, and the government will set up a land bank and manage this to acquire land for public interest and redistribute the land

Phelim Kine, senior campaigns director with the environmental group Mighty Earth, said the Indonesian parliament had made “a ruinous false choice between environmental sustainability and economic growth”

would legitimise “uncontrolled deforestation as an engine for a so-called pro-investment job creation policy.”