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Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

I learned something new about chain migration, as the Trump administration calls it, this week. The ability of a new immigrant to sponsor extended members of her family for permanent residence and eventually citizenship was originally a product of white supremacy! It was designed to keep America from becoming too brown.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way, with family unification compounding the unprecedented racial and demographic shifts of the last half-century. At the time, though, many on the left were in favor of merit-based immigration laws, precisely because they would replace the racist quotas embedded in the hugely restrictionist 1924 law, and allow for people to be admitted based on their abilities rather than on their country of origin.

What I love about this nugget is how it exposes our right-left divide as constantly in flux over the decades, and how it reveals the eternal fact of all legislation: that unintended consequences are often as salient as intended ones.

Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.

As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

Pandemics fade. Racism does not. And when a president like Donald Trump unfairly blames an entire ethnic group for the coronavirus pandemic crisis, it can embolden discrimination and violence.

On a recent January morning, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old from Thailand, was walking in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the police say, a 19-year-old man slammed into Mr. Vicha, knocking him down. He died two days later in the hospital.

“The rhetoric spurred by the previous administration when the pandemic started — using ‘China virus,’ ‘kung flu’ and all that kind of stuff — has made Asian-Americans a target to basically people who are racist,” Daniel Wu, star of the television series “Into the Badlands,” told me in a recent interview. Mr. Wu was born in Berkeley, Calif., worked as an actor in Hong Kong for many years and is now active in the campaign to prevent attacks against Asian-Americans.

Myanmar’s nominal transition to democracy ended abruptly on Feb. 1 when the military arrested the civilian government and seized power. This coup was the most egregious among the three in the country’s modern history. The military claimed it was acting in response to election irregularities, but the charges it later imposed on elected leaders — the country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was accused of illegally importing walkie-talkies, for example — were preposterous. Of course, the Burmese military leaders’ actual goal is to nullify the results of the November 2020 democratic elections.

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, later expanded sanctions to include individual members of the Burmese military.

More than 130 nongovernmental organizations around the world have called on the Security Council to take such action.

Donald Trump named more of his political allies to serve as ambassadors than any president in modern history. Now the pressure is on Joe Biden to reverse that trend — and set a new standard.

“Our diplomats expect Biden to build diplomacy back better. That’s what he promised on the campaign trail,” said Brett Bruen, a former Foreign Service officer who now does consulting work.

The Biden presidency is no different, according to interviews with five donors, but after the perception of corruption around nominees grew during the Trump years, Biden is being pressed to appoint more career diplomats.

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

China, one of the world's biggest users of plastic, has unveiled a major plan to reduce single-use plastics across the country. Non-degradable bags will be banned in major cities by the end of 2020 and in all cities and towns by 2022.

In 2017 alone, China collected 215 million tonnes of urban household waste. But national figures for recycling are not available.

The National Development and Reform Commission on Sunday issued the new policy, which will be implemented over the next five years.

The Serum Institute of India is the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume, founded over 50 years ago by now-multibillionaire Cyrus Poonawalla. It will likely provide not only almost all the vaccines administered in India, but many elsewhere in the world too, once exports are permitted later in the year.

Research by Fitch Solutions outlines three groups of Asian economies this year: Those that can plausibly vaccinate most of the people in priority groups such as health-care workers and the elderly by June, those that can do so by September and those that will take longer. India is by some distance the lowest-income country in the first group of economies, which includes Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Malaysia.

Wealthier South Korea and Thailand will take longer.

A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.

But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.

Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.

traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.

Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption

The WHO spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars honing a globe-spanning system of defenses against a pandemic it knew would come. But the virus moved faster than the United Nations agency, exposing flaws in its design and operation that bogged down its response when the world needed to take action.

The WHO relied on an honor system to stop a viral cataclysm. Its member states had agreed to improve their ability to contain infectious disease epidemics and to report any outbreaks that might spread beyond their borders. International law requires them to do both.

Time and again, countries big and small have failed to do so. The WHO, which isn’t a regulatory agency, lacks the authority to force information from the very governments that finance its programs and elect its leaders

Wildlife, intensively fed and bred livestock, and humans to all intents and purposes, now constitute a common planetary reservoir of perpetually evolving and mutating micro-organisms, some of them baleful. The Global Virome Project, established, as its name suggests, to coordinate worldwide research, estimates that there are 1.6m potential zoonotic viruses in the world with just 1% of them currently identified and analysed.

All this is happening at ever briefer intervals. Demography remakes geography, transforming – right now, and not for the better – the future of life on Earth.

y the end of 2021, up to 18 million people had died, worldwide, from Covid-19 infection, according to some estimates. You would suppose that in the face of a pandemic – an outbreak that by definition is global – together with a recognition of shared vulnerability, governments and politicians might have set aside the usual mutual suspicions and, under the aegis of the WHO, agreed on common approaches to containment, vaccination and control

The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.

All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.

then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.

The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”

Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.

It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.

The resolution on Thursday night saw 141 countries in favour with seven against and 32 abstentions, including China.

Ukraine’s allies failed to improve on numbers seen in the last vote on the issue in October immediately after Russia annexed republics in the east of Ukraine. In that vote 143 countries backed the resolution, with five against and 35 abstentions.

Among the big countries abstaining on Thursday, Thailand said it did not want to become involved in a morality play, adding that billions of bystanders were bearing the brunt of the war.

Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.

Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.