Earlier this week a delegation of Chinese medics arrived at Malpensa airport near Milan from Shanghai on a special China Eastern flight carrying 400,000 masks and 17 tons of equipment. The salutation banner the visitors rolled out on the tarmac, in red and white, read, “We’re waves from the same sea, leaves from the same…
Following Iraqi president Barham Saleh’s nomination of Adnan al-Zarfi (Zurufi or Zurfi) as the new Prime Minister, Iraq has entered a critical stage. The Shia block is divided. The 30 days given to al-Zarfi to nominate his cabinet will lead either to a quorum of the parliament recognising his new cabinet and in consequences to…
The U.S. is ramping up pressure on Australia to support hostilities against China in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Last week in Sydney, the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, Arthur Culvahouse, said that “We’ll be pushing Australia to expand its step-up from the Pacific islands region to south-east Asia and to look north as well.” The U.S.,…
Iran’s New Year celebration of Nowruz finds it weathering a perfect storm of US sanctions, low oil prices and Covid-19. The resulting humanitarian crisis may make it even more resilient, as Iranians rally around their government. Iran is facing an existential crisis, brought on by a combination of economic, political and social emergencies which, when…
In a speech delivered Thursday announcing that the number of confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide had risen to 200,000, the director of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated that “the only way we can defeat this pandemic, as we have always been saying, is through solidarity. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity … We’re one human…
The new coronavirus and its accompanying disease Covid-19 has stopped the globe in its tracks. Governments, markets and news cycles have become dominated by the pandemic. Europe is now the epicenter for the disease, with reportedly more fatal cases of infection than China where the virus first erupted in December. Several European Union countries have…
