InternationalRelations

Nobody here has viewed government as actually very functional for a long time, and not because it couldn’t be. It has been increasingly designed to fail. Specifically, it’s been designed to respond to powerful lobbies that want deregulation or tax cuts or some special privileges rather than to function in a normal way. And powerful people shrug their shoulders at that, because for the élites that’s been O.K., but it obviously hasn’t really been O.K. for a long time. We’ve had rising death rates. We’ve had the deaths of despair. We’ve had the failure to come to grips with climate change. We’ve had widening inequalities and massive suffering. But it hasn’t mattered in such a visible way.

my argument then was to not equate poverty with incompetence of governments. What we’re talking about today is a converse—don’t equate wealth with competence of governments. You can be wealthy and miserably corrupt and miserably ineffective, just like you can be poor and effective in governance.

The United States is completely failing at the federal level to control this epidemic. It’s a tragedy. We’re losing tens of thousands of lives unnecessarily because of the shambolic failure of Trump and his team to mobilize the vast resources of our country, both human and material. At the same time, there are poor countries that are doing much, much better at controlling the epidemic. Take a country like Vietnam, which is a low-income country in East Asia, and close to China, but for a variety of reasons they acted very quickly to stop the transmission of the virus, to a much greater extent than we did. They also don’t have the means for mass testing and so on. At least to date, they have been able to keep the epidemic more under control through public-health means, which is identifying potentially sick people, helping them to isolate, tracing their contacts, helping those people to isolate, and so on.

what I am recommending is that the International Monetary Fund provide emergency financing at essentially zero conditionality, other than that it be used responsibly. And that the World Health Organization work with governments that have the potential to supply additional equipment—that’s China, Korea, Japan, and a few others—and use the emergency financing and the availability of this urgently needed equipment to get it to these countries in need.

the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.

I’ve been a critic of the United States over the past quarter century for inaction, complacency, and overmilitarization. This is not new for me, but Trump is the worst American leader in our history, and he is a contemptible figure, so he’s creating more damage. But the fact of the lack of American leadership has been true, by and large, for the last twenty years, with a couple of notable exceptions.

The funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, T.B. and Malaria was essentially frozen at a time when it was important for that funding to increase. This is very modest levels of funding. It’s hundreds of millions or low billions of dollars. We speak in trillions in general, so I was not pleased and not impressed by that response. I thought it was shortsighted and harmful

the question of what’s politically possible and not politically possible, in my opinion and experience, is a lot more interesting and subtle than the typical views.

aid from the U.S. to developing countries is 0.16 per cent of G.D.P. It’s tiny. It’s a shocking level of ignorance and nastiness that it’s not higher. We’re talking about tiny amounts compared with all the other numbers that we are using these days. So think about the three hundred and fifty billion for the small-business program that quickly got exhausted and will now be another three hundred billion. The total cost of controlling malaria in the world per year is probably about three to five billion maximum, only a small fraction of which comes from the United States. We’re talking about incommensurate quantities in general. The aid is limited, not because we can’t afford it but primarily because our political system pays no attention to these issues.

Our political system for forty years now, since Ronald Reagan, has basically been dedicated to tax cuts, especially for rich people and corporations

What interests Hill is how the three such different countries end up in the same boat, run by populists and significantly less able to cope with a pandemic than their neighbours. She believes the critical common factor is the heady rise, and then the catastrophic collapse, of heavy industry and the failure of their governments to manage the fall and cushion the impact on their people.

when you’re coming from the north of England, you are completely network-poor – you have no idea of how to go about it. It’s all about mentorship and connections

In all three countries, the government did little to mitigate the pain, leaving afflicted families to move to where the jobs were. In practice, the barriers to mobility – vast distances and bureaucracy in Russia, house prices in the UK – kept them anchored. Even in the US, the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 made movement harder. And in all three countries, the ties of family obligations and social networks kept people rooted in place without prospects, and educational opportunities to change your destiny have withered away.

“If you’re in the north of England it’s probably easier to move to Australia, Canada or America and start again, like some of my family did, rather than trying to find a job in the south,” Hill said. “House prices in the north-east were so ridiculously low vis-a-vis in London or the south.”

In both the UK and Russia, the planners had built new towns as part of the great industrialisation drive, which suddenly had their economic lifelines cut off and were left to wither. Hill felt another echo when she visited the American midwest, where her in-laws lived. The great cities built on steel and automobiles had died, leaving hollowed-out communities.

“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”

“Populism provides a narrative for people who have lost their identities that were tied to meaningful work,” she said. “When people lose that then they’re looking for something. There’s a feeling they’ve been robbed and deprived of a golden age, and they want that back and populist politics feeds upon that, and provides scapegoats for losing it.”

At the interview in London, only she and another northern girl, a farmer’s daughter from Sunderland, took the time to chat to the secretary. It turned out that the secretary was part of the selection panel, and it was the two northerners who won the fellowships.

“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,”

Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.

“It’s not like the first time I’ve been mistaken for a secretary. I’ve been mistaken for many things, believe me,”

“A lot of this stuff which is described as policy is really all about personal fighting … And it’s kind of a comedy of errors, with all this intriguing. It’s very reminiscent of Kremlin intrigue and the kind of intrigue around No 10 in the UK – people always trying to do each other in.”

She argues Trump’s desire to forge a personal relationship with Putin is no different from his approach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, or Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “He wants to be like he was as a CEO, he has all these discussions with people in private … He has a very informal style with everyone. Putin is similar. He just tries to engage with people in the way that he thinks kind of fits them best,” she said. “Boris is the same. It’s like the guy in the pub. It’s less getting into the weeds of the substance in some sort of formal way, and more two guys talking.

“He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi or Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.” But Putin could not be treated like the others. The Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries, and the candidate had appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. Furthermore, as Hill made clear in her biography of him, Putin has taken all the skills of his long KGB career with him to the Russian presidency. And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.

In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.

It gave Russians unnecessary leverage

He has torn up one arms control agreement after another with the result that in less than a year’s time, there could be no limits left on the world’s major nuclear arsenals.

Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs committee, said Trump’s surprising decision would encourage European nations “to listen less to the US” while he remained in power.

pointed observations to the Nato 2030 conference: “The challenges that we face over the next decade are greater than any of us can tackle alone. Neither Europe alone. Nor America alone. So we must resist the temptation of national solutions.”

The move has been widely interpreted as a personal rebuff to Angela Merkel following what was reportedly a frosty phone call between the two at the end of May, when the German chancellor torpedoed Trump’s hopes to hold a G7 summit in the US in June.

US troops have been deployed in Germany since the end of the second world war, and although the numbers are sharply down from the 400,000 at the height of the cold war, their presence is partly designed to deter Russian aggression

troop numbers “were always an exercise in political psychology” but one that mattered given that, with troops stationed in all three Baltic states, Nato faces as many as 500,000 Russian troops in its western military district.

Experts say the US cannot operate in the Middle East or Afghanistan without the vast Ramstein air base in western Germany, which acts as a logistics staging post, while Stuttgart is also the headquarters of the US Africa Command as well as its European operations.

“Perhaps the most sobering political development as the protests reached the one-week mark was a growing inclination among some prominent elected and security officials to frame the civil unrest in the language of armed conflict,”

The killing, and the Trump administration’s response to the upheaval, risk further eroding the “global standing and credibility” of the US “particularly when it comes to condemning repression or brutality perpetrated by other governments”, the Crisis Group said.

On Wednesday, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, implored the US to confront “endemic and structural racism” and address the “deep-seated grievances” at the heart of the protests.  She assailed the president’s characterization of protesters as “terrorists” and condemned the “unprecedented assault on journalists”.  “The anger we have seen in the US, erupting as Covid-19 exposes glaring inequalities in society, shows why far-reaching reforms and inclusive dialogue are needed there to break the cycle of impunity for unlawful killings by police and racial bias in policing,”

press freedom advocacy groups have tracked more than 125 incidents in three days of journalists facing attacks from police and protesters and other press freedom violations, including incidents with foreign journalists from Germany, Britain, and Australia.

The cost advantage of producing in China has eroded in recent years as the country has become richer and wages have soared.

The extended shutdown of many Chinese factories has pushed exports down 17 percent in the first two months of the year compared with a year earlier, and it has disrupted the production of European cars, iPhones, and other consumer goods.

there are still many advantages to producing in China, such as scale and efficient logistics. But the coronavirus crisis could mark a tipping point that prompts many businesses to remodel their supply chains and invest in more resilient and often more local patterns of production

businesses may discover that while face-to-face meetings are sometimes necessary, technological alternatives are often just fine

there is both an environmental reason and an economic one why business travel may decline

the coronavirus crisis has also exposed the hollowness of nativists’ assertions that their anti-immigration and protectionist policies make people safer. Even though the nationalist coalition that runs Lombardy’s provincial government is led by Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, it has not been successful in protecting the region from the coronavirus. Nor, for all his desire to decouple from China, has Trump been able to prevent the coronavirus from reaching the United States

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy.

“There has always been a stock, it’s a very organized chain. It’s the way to control everything, especially the price. The stocks are on beaches such as Tarena [near the border with Panama], banana plantations, in the jungle. The stashes are everywhere,”

Traditionally, smugglers have used small, very fast speedboats, as well as fishing vessels and submarines, to ply their northern route. Lockdowns have made these methods harder to use, mainly for logistical reasons. So instead, smugglers are turning back to older, slower routes that are often broken up in parts.

Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. Colombia’s banana industry, for example, has been exempt from local lockdown measures, allowing cocaine to keep moving through the crop’s supply chain. “[Anyone] in the authorities or security that meddles with this route goes down,” said Rául, the Gulf Clan member, adding that people who are paid off to facilitate the smuggling of cocaine have an incentive to keep the drugs flowing. “Everybody eats,” he said.

Mexican cartels have used the crisis as a public relations opportunity. People associated with the cartels, including the daughter of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, have publicly distributed food and other essential items to the poor. Meanwhile, the country’s drug violence continues unabated, claiming an average of 80 lives per day.

cocaine continues to flow from South America to Europe and North America. Closed trafficking routes have been replaced with new ones, and street deals have been substituted with door-to-door deliveries.

Ramón Santolaria, the head of anti-narcotics at Spain’s national police in Catalonia, said cocaine traffickers may have mistakenly assumed that the pandemic would have reduced monitoring at ports. The cartels “have to continue exporting,” Santolaria said. “They are like a company. They can’t store everything in their countries, since it would be very risky.”

Italy has fallen silent as a point of arrival, despite being home to mafia groups that dominate Europe’s cocaine trade. Seizures dropped by 80 percent over the months of March and April compared to the same period last year

“Italy did not receive much via ports or airports and that is because during lockdown we have been controlling them a lot,” said Marco Sorrentino, the head of anti-mafia department of Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza. Italian crime groups have shifted their operations to Spain, where they have large “colonies” according to Sorrentino. “Italian mafias and their partners thus sent cocaine mainly to Algeciras or Barcelona, and then from there they moved it on wheels to the rest of Europe and to Italy,” he said. “As cover-up they used trucks filled with fresh fruits or also soy flour,” which resembles cocaine.

At the street level, lockdowns have played havoc with cocaine sales — but have also failed to stop the trade. But in some cases at least, dealers’ adaptations may have actually put them in a more profitable position than before, as cocaine users are desperate and confined at home. “Even though they don’t lack product, they have raised prices a bit and are cutting it more,”

The solution? Delivering it to customers in the guise of food orders, or couriered by essential workers carrying documents that give them permission to move around freely. Dealers have also staked out positions in socially distanced queues outside supermarkets — one of the only permitted places to gather in public under Italy’s strict lockdown rules, which began easing up in early May.

The main dark web marketplaces have seen an increase in sales of roughly 30 percent since lockdown measures started coming into effect worldwide

“Private citizens who are in need and won’t have access to a bank loan will be victims of loan sharks,” he said. “But what worries us the most is that licit companies might be in need, and be approached by mafia organizations that will propose to become minority shareholders.” “And once this happens, they actually take over the whole company,”

these two maps capture the paradox of America’s post­-Cold War liberal internationalism. Americans might have seen their ambitions as benign, but many others around the world found them threatening. The result is a strange contradiction whereby organizations like Freedom House and the Open Society Foundations appear to represent a kind of earnest if slightly quixotic idealism in Washington while becoming the subject of countless conspiracy theories abroad. For those who imagined color revolutions as a series of CIA-sponsored plots to spread U.S. influence under the guise of democracy, the Freedom House map was also the Pentagon map; seeing the world painted all one shade was tantamount to the United States conquering it.

Maps have proved particularly popular with people looking for the so-called real fault lines—be they religious, ethnic, or geopolitical—along which the post-Cold War world would inevitably fracture

an equally essentialist view of human society inspired a series of completely contradictory maps imagining what the Middle East’s so-called real borders would look like. Amid the chaos of Iraq’s civil war, some observers began to focus on the fault lines within Huntington’s category of Islamic civilization and concluded that it was, say, the tensions between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds that would ultimately prove insurmountable. In 2013, for example, one widely circulated map from the New York Times showed how Syria and Iraq might end up reconfigured on ethno-sectarian terms as four smaller, seemingly more homogeneous, states.

while the post-Cold War world has indeed remained conflict-prone, the conflicts themselves have not followed the predictions of any one particular pessimist

Risk geopolitics are certainly more fun to read about than the alternative, and they make for sharper and more compelling maps. But they also come at a cost

Despite testing far less than its neighbors, Somalia has the highest death toll in East Africa. On April 17 and 18, 72 people were tested, out of which 55 were confirmed positive, a staggering 76 percent infection rate. Since this revelation, the Somali government has stopped sharing the numbers of people tested with the public.

Anecdotal accounts of COVID-19 symptoms and a spike in burials abound. “There is extraordinary community transmission. Infections and deaths are out of control,” explained a Mogadishu doctor on the condition of anonymity. “And why visit a hospital if they can’t treat you?” Somalia’s health infrastructure is mere scaffolding: scarce public hospitals struggling with a lack of equipment, unaccredited doctors in private facilities offering unaffordable services, and medication that is as low-grade as it is scarce.

Somalia’s best-equipped medical institution, Erdogan Hospital in Mogadishu, was shut down in April after 3 of its doctors were infected. Martini Hospital—kitted with 76 beds—is the only medical facility in the whole country designated to treat the infected

Answers to this acute health crisis lie in part with the government’s 2020 budget, which allocated $9.4 million for health spending, a mere 2 percent of the national budget. A whopping $146.8 million was reserved for security institutions—a telling indication of a cash-strapped state facing widespread security threats.

The group heralded the disease as divine punishment for the treatment of Muslims globally. Weaponizing the disease, al-Shabab ushered in Ramadan with an attempted vehicle-borne explosive attack at a military base on the first full day of the holy month.

Like the virus, al-Shabab transcends national borders and presents risks not only to Somalia but to its pandemic-weakened neighbors, particularly Kenya, which has weathered violent attacks from the group for years. Born out of a power vacuum itself, al-Shabab will capitalize on lapses in states’ security apparatus as governments redirect resources from preempting terror attacks to enforcing curfews

risks reversing critical security gains

Kenya’s northeastern towns lying on its border with Somalia have been particularly vulnerable to devastating al-Shabab attacks. In response to the illegal smuggling of people and goods from both Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenyan security authorities have recently ramped up aerial surveillance along its borders, in part, to curtail cross-border infection. Ethiopia’s health minister announced last week that 13 of its new cases were imported via illegal migration from Djibouti and Somalia

More than 80 percent of global trade passes through the Gulf of Aden

the resurgence of piracy can be expected

For more than a year now, the central government has been embroiled in a rancorous fight with two of its federal states. This being an election year, the fledgling Somali state finds itself at a critical juncture. It remains to be seen whether federal elections will be postponed, following in the footsteps of neighboring Ethiopia.

The specter of drought and famine, alongside the unforgiving plague of locusts that has ravaged crops in recent months

harrowing statistics from across Europe show that Somali communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. In Sweden, Somalis are dying from the virus at “an astonishing high rate” according to the BMJ despite accounting for only 0.69 percent of the population. The World Bank is calling on governments to designate remittance companies as an essential service, a crucial step to easing restrictions on these financial flows.

The populations most at risk in Somalia are those living in the densely populated camps scattered across the country. More than 2.5 million internally displaced people live in these cramped conditions, already weakened by malnutrition and compromised immune systems, and with limited access to clean water, soap, or bathrooms.

According to the World Food Programme, the number of food-insecure people in East Africa is projected to reach up to 43 million in the next few months—more than double what it is now—sparking fears of conflict over scarce resources.

The disappearance of remittances—a lifeline for millions on the continent and estimated at $1.4 to $2 billion annually in Somalia alone—makes the situation all the more desperate. These critical cash flows have dried up as a global recession sets in and incomes of workers in the diaspora shrink.

deadly flash floods

will force more people to move, compounding the internal displacement crisis and heightening intercommunal tensions  even as it spreads the disease further

Border closures across the region have throttled migration flows, making it ever harder for people to escape conflict or starvation. This will simply force migration into the shadows, opening up avenues for human trafficking and exploitation. Irregular movement of refugees has already been observed across the Horn of Africa’s highly porous borders.

During  Friday prayers at Mogadishu’s Marwazi mosque on April 10, armed forces tried to forcibly disperse a congregation of worshippers without notice. A massive demonstration broke out, and shoulder-to-shoulder prayers continue across the country today

Riots swept the streets of Mogadishu again on April 24 in response to the fatal shooting of two innocent civilians by police as they tried to enforce a curfew. Ramadan, replete with nightly rounds of public taraweeh prayers, is likely to catalyze disease spread in the absence of clear communication with communities and Islamic leaders.

The virus demands self-sufficiency. Countries are forced to make do with their own systems, however broken.

government’s restrictions on press freedom and access to information about the novel coronavirus to the detriment of its own people

As has often been the case in the disaster-prone country, it will be up to grassroots community groups, the private sector, and members of the diaspora to mobilize en masse to contain the crisis.

Two officials at the Ministry of Health have already been arrested on corruption allegations related to COVID-19 response donations, denting public confidence.

With domestic flights suspended, it is all the more critical to invest in hospital and testing capacity across the country. This cannot be achieved without genuine collaboration between the federal government and its constituent member states.

I listened to the pilots, to their voices, and I trust them much more than I would trust myself. And they’re clearly seeing something extraordinary. Now, whether it’s alien life, who knows? It’s a plausible explanation. My point is that we should be agnostic about this and simply study it scientifically. Let’s do the science and then we can talk about what we found. Until we’ve done that, it’s all bullshit.

no one has bothered to actually look for UFOs. We’re looking for ETs around distant stars, we’re looking for comets, we’re looking at all kinds of other things in the atmosphere. No one, as far as I know, is seriously looking for UFOs.

The puzzle is that we’re not doing the science. To me, that’s the essential phenomenon that’s of interest.

if ETs were discovered, it would be the most important event in human history.

it could be a very dangerous event in the sense that we might see a collapse of state authority. We might see chaos. The possibility of contact with a civilization that has vastly more knowledge than we do is exciting and terrifying and unpredictable.

My feeling is that if they’re here, they’re almost certainly peaceful, because if they were not peaceful they would have wiped us out a long time ago. They can probably do it very quickly. So my assumption is they don’t mean any harm. But it’s still the case that society could implode or destabilize as a result of colliding with ETs.

I worry less about poking around and getting conquered and more about the potential realization that these things are here and then an internal implosion of our society. So I worry about my fellow human beings more than I worry about the aliens. So I guess in that sense, I disagree with Hawking’s premise that they’re out to get us. But sure, it’s possible they’re on a surveillance mission. But people have been reporting UFOs for at least 80 years, and that’s a really, really long surveillance mission. And also, why would they want to conquer us? That’s like us conquering ants.

people have speculated that any civilization that’s able to travel between the stars would have to become nonviolent, because they would never survive long enough if they’re violent among themselves to actually reach a point where their technology was that sophisticated. And human beings don’t seem to be as violent as we used to be, so there’s that.

For governments, there’s no real upside to talking about this. They can’t control this. If there are ETs, they don’t have the power to do anything about it. They’re helpless in the face of ETs. And there’s a big downside risk of social chaos, loss of authority, loss of control and all that. So I think governments have lots of reasons to let a sleeping dog lie, which is why the Navy’s thing is so surprising in a way.

I’m a strong disbeliever in any kind of conspiracy argument. I don’t think there has ever been a conspiracy to cover up the truth that we know that aliens are here. At most, we’ve covered up the fact that we have no idea what’s going on.

I only write articles where I don’t know the answer ahead of time

Montezuma could’ve prepared a lot better for Cortes than he did, had he only known Cortes was coming.

a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.

A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf. Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg

While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

The continent averages less than one intensive care bed and one ventilator per 100,000 people, Reuters found.

Donations have poured in from a foundation set up by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, and the World Bank is helping procure more than $1 billion worth of equipment for Africa.

even in a best-case scenario, Africa could need at least 111,000 more intensive care beds and ventilators - more than 10 times the number it has at present.

Tanzania, publicly criticised by the WHO for not restricting large gatherings, has sometimes gone for days without updating its coronavirus figures and has refused to tell donors anything about its public health resources

In Madagascar, where the president is pushing a botanically-based remedy untested in an international clinical trial, the health ministry took five weeks to respond to Reuters questions about the number of ventilators in the country.

The WHO does not have the funds to carry out detailed surveys on a regular basis, Yao said. "Information is critical for us to better help," he told Reuters. "It's difficult to anticipate their overall needs if you don't have accurate information."

around 685 tests have been carried out per million people - far below the 37,000 per million in Italy or 22,000 in the United States.

South Africa accounts for 30% of Africa’s tests, although it has less than 5% of the population. Nigeria, which has 15% of the population, has carried out just 2% of testing; it began by testing strategically then broadened it out, Health Minister Osagie Ehanire said. Chad and Burundi have carried out fewer than 500 tests each. Chad said it didn’t have enough testing kits and staff after many of them had fallen ill; Burundi did not respond. Tanzania carried out 652 tests and identified 480 cases.

the World Bank is helping more than 30 African nations source medical supplies. South Sudan recently received a donation of five ventilators, bringing its total to nine. But the new ventilators have yet to be plugged in because the isolation centre is being expanded

Intensive care beds are expensive, difficult to run, and very unevenly distributed. Chad, an oil-rich but impoverished nation of 15 million people, has only 10, whereas the island nation of Mauritius, a financial hub home to 1.2 million, has 121.

The continent’s three giants - Nigeria, Ethiopia and Egypt - have 1,920 intensive care beds between them for more than 400 million people

Kenya has 518 beds in its public and private facilities, but 94% are already occupied by non-COVID-19 patients

Under a best-case scenario - what Imperial College researcher Charlie Whittaker described as a complete lockdown for an indefinite time - at least 121,000 critical care beds will be needed at the peak of the pandemic on the continent, Reuters found. That compares with 9,800 at present

Africa has no history of building ventilators. South Africa’s state-owned defence company Denel plans to begin making them, and institutions in Kenya and Senegal have developed prototypes. But authorities in Senegal say they’ve only certified imports before; it could take months to get a prototype certified and mass-produced.

In many nations like Nigeria, South Sudan and Zimbabwe, electricity is extremely unreliable and hospitals depend on diesel-powered generators. Some health facilities in poorer, often rural, areas are unable to pay for the constant refueling and maintenance they need.

Continent-wide, one doctor serves an average of 80,000 people, World Bank data shows. There are more in wealthy Mauritius - 2 doctors per 1,000 - but countries like Liberia, Malawi or Burundi have far fewer.

only nine countries have one or more physicians qualified to administer anaesthetics per 100,000 people, according to the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists. Most have staffing levels comparable to Afghanistan or Haiti.

The Africa CDC, set up by the African Union in 2017, worked with the WHO to rapidly roll out testing. In January, only South Africa and Senegal could test for the new coronavirus, but now all African countries can perform tests apart from tiny Lesotho and the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.

Private hospitals are generally better staffed, but their revenues have dropped by an average of 40% since March, mostly due to a decline in elective surgeries and regular outpatient chronic treatment, said the Africa Healthcare Federation, an umbrella organisation for the private healthcare sector. Private hospitals are also having to spend more on protective equipment, and private insurance companies are delaying settling claims in many countries, said Dr. Amit Thakker, the head of the federation.

nternational gas companies - poised to invest billions in the off-shore gas fields discovered along the coast of Cabo Delgado - are now getting cold feet, partly because of the rising insecurity, but also because of falling gas prices.

concerns that the conflict, if mishandled, could spread into neighbouring Tanzania, and perhaps even to South Africa

"The army, from the beginning… beat people up, took them to jail, tortured them. There's a lot of Islamophobia [in the majority Muslim province of Cabo Delgado]. They're discriminated against because they're northerners - people think they're dumb. "The problem is that we have a youth bulge - and the young don't have jobs. If we solve… the abuse of force, corruption, and if we have a serious system of justice I'm sure we'll solve this very rapidly,"

Many observers and analysts believe that, fundamentally, the solution to the conflict lies in good governance, and a transparent attempt to address deep-seated economic and social grievances, including fair access to land, jobs, and a share of any future gas revenues."Multi-nationals want to know they can take their share, but they have to consider local people," said the Bishop of Pemba. "And the government has to know that it is very necessary that Mozambique's natural resources must be used for the betterment of its people, not to cause corruption,"

We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.

Actually, we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants. Now we feel it. The shift has to do with the concentration and intensity of what’s happening. September 11th was a single day, and everyone felt the shock of it, but our daily habits didn’t shift, except at airports; the President even urged us to keep shopping. This crisis is different. It’s a biological threat, and it’s global. Everyone has to change together to deal with it. That’s really history.

There are 7.8 billion people alive on this planet—a stupendous social and technological achievement that’s unnatural and unstable. It’s made possible by science, which has already been saving us. Now, though, when disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization—we feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science keeps from crashing down

Today, in theory, everyone knows everything. We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling.

Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society. That’s another part of the new structure of feeling.

it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

water shortages. And food shortages, electricity outages, devastating storms, droughts, floods. These are easy calls. They’re baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties

Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave.

science fiction is the realism of our time

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

remember that you must die. Older people are sometimes better at keeping this in mind than younger people. Still, we’re all prone to forgetting death. It never seems quite real until the end, and even then it’s hard to believe. The reality of death is another thing we know about but don’t feel.

This mixture of dread and apprehension and normality is the sensation of plague on the loose. It could be part of our new structure of feeling, too.

there are charismatic mega-ideas. “Flatten the curve” could be one of them. Immediately, we get it. There’s an infectious, deadly plague that spreads easily, and, although we can’t avoid it entirely, we can try to avoid a big spike in infections, so that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed and fewer people will die. It makes sense, and it’s something all of us can help to do. When we do it—if we do it—it will be a civilizational achievement: a new thing that our scientific, educated, high-tech species is capable of doing. Knowing that we can act in concert when necessary is another thing that will change us.

People who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.

We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people.

Amid the tragedy and death, this is one source of pleasure. Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.

Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years

We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view.

It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.

The neoliberal structure of feeling totters. What might a post-capitalist response to this crisis include? Maybe rent and debt relief; unemployment aid for all those laid off; government hiring for contact tracing and the manufacture of necessary health equipment; the world’s militaries used to support health care; the rapid construction of hospitals.

If the project of civilization—including science, economics, politics, and all the rest of it—were to bring all eight billion of us into a long-term balance with Earth’s biosphere, we could do it. By contrast, when the project of civilization is to create profit—which, by definition, goes to only a few—much of what we do is actively harmful to the long-term prospects of our species.

Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it’s used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within a system of destructive falsehoods. We need a new political economy by which to make our calculations. Now, acutely, we feel that need.

We’ll remember this even if we pretend not to. History is happening now, and it will have happened. So what will we do with that?

How we feel is shaped by what we value, and vice versa. Food, water, shelter, clothing, education, health care: maybe now we value these things more, along with the people whose work creates them. To survive the next century, we need to start valuing the planet more, too, since it’s our only home.

Waters has no health insurance when he’s back in the U.S. (even as a nurse). Working on the front lines during a global pandemic is probably not the best place for an uninsured nurse. Like most expats, Waters has private health insurance that will cover him in literally any country in the world… except the U.S.

David’s visa is entirely tied to his job, which he fears will be axed soon in a country economically crushed by this pandemic. He could theoretically apply for other jobs before his visa expires, but not in reality. “The police won’t even let me leave my house!” If he loses his job, he’ll be forced to go home, though he hasn’t a clue where “home” would be. That and he would have no job, place to live, or health insurance. 

The uncertainty around visas is also hard on couples and families who have visas tied exclusively to their relationship, even though these are oftentimes the most secure ones to have

“Immigrants are the ones blamed during economically hard times,” says Schober, “and people look for a scapegoat.” It’s pretty universal for humans to have less compassion for people they don’t have something in common with, he says, so foreigners around the world are often the most vulnerable.

Immigration lawyer Diana Moller of Seattle says she’s concerned about green card holders who are stuck abroad. Legally, they can return to the U.S., but many are under lockdown due to the virus. In order for them to apply for citizenship, they can’t be overseas for long. “If a client is outside the U.S. more than six months, their continuous physical presence is at risk of being broken.” If they’re gone for a year, they’ll have to wait four years and one day before eligible again for citizenship.

Before any of the virus chaos started, the U.S. has notoriously made it hard for many (not rich) foreigners to live, work, or permanently immigrate here, but the pandemic has led some to just abandon ship entirely and go home.

Stéphane’s most recent visa was up for renewal again this spring, but the pandemic forced him and his wife to consider the risk of him losing his work contract, thus being locked into NYC illegally with no job, no way to pay rent, and no health insurance. “The U.S. looked like the worst place to be an illegal immigrant,” he says—especially during a pandemic. So he gave up the American life he spent five years building and took his family back to France, even though it means he’s now starting over. “The French health care/social net is way better and higher education is relatively cheap and good quality,”

Like every single American I spoke with, Sarah is pretty scared of getting sick in the U.S. due to lack of good insurance. “Honestly, my life would have been so much easier if me and my boyfriend had just gotten married two years ago,” like they’d considered. France is her home but she’s not allowed there any time soon. “I wish I’d just stayed in France.” She would have been illegal until getting married, but she would have at least been with him. And insured. 

“A good thing about having an ineffective Congress is that immigration changes are slow,” says Schober. “They can never agree on anything.”

important to remember that people working in immigration are doing their best to care for such a vulnerable group of people right now. Some are even putting their lives and health at risk to show up at court for their clients. Schober says it’s especially important to remember that the present situation will take a lot of patience from both the attorney and client. But for now, it’s a waiting game for millions of people in limbo around the world, all wondering if the countries they have built their lives in will soon change the rules and make them return home… wherever that is. 

When Ambassador Grenell couldn’t break me, he started to pressure my coalition partner. Apparently not just threatening them but by maybe making some attractive future offer where they would lead the government, which actually is what they want. Telling them, “You are under Mr. Kurti’s shadow. You can’t take over. Just do this motion of no confidence. Drop reciprocity,” and so on and so forth. 

his hurry makes him side with Belgrade because if you want a quick fix, then you pressure the weaker side

I think a territorial exchange is going to lead to more refugees and more conflict and not really new borders as they might think