We are sadly sending off “Twenty-Twenty” and entering 2021 with very little hope for a better year. In the New Year, people will continue to live with the inconvenience of wearing face masks and in fear of inhaling the often lethal coronavirus, until community immunity has been established with universal vaccination, which still looks remote. Enviously watching TV footage of vaccines being given in the United States, Europe and some countries in Asia, 50 million South Koreans, once

Undoubtedly, history will remember 2020 as the Year of the Global Pandemic. For the first time since the Spanish flu hit the world in the early 20th century, a worldwide disease caused society to change drastically on a vast scale. Throughout the year the coronavirus panicked and paralyzed society by indiscriminately attacking people, forcing businesses to shut down and devastating the economy. Aside from the countless people who lost their lives, many others lost their jobs and suffered grief a

The rare activist moment at China’s central bank was too late and too crude. For years, when it came to innovative business ideas, Beijing’s stance has been to let them flourish -- there’s always room to regulate and rein in later. And thus gig economy superstars have blossomed. China’s versions of Uber Technologies, DoorDash and PayPal Holdings are more ubiquitous than their US counterparts at home. The other side of the coin is that billions of dollars in paper gains

Very few of the people who voted for US President Donald Trump in the 2020 election are plutocrats who benefited from his and congressional Republicans’ tax cut, or even wannabe plutocrats who can hope to benefit from it in the future. Some Trump voters doubtless are very focused on the installation of right-wing judges on the federal bench. But many among the 74 million who voted for Trump did so for other reasons. The one reason most of them share, however, is that Trump presided during

Now we know how this movie ends. “Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May declared in those electric but mystifying opening scenes after the referendum back in 2016. It wasn’t clear then or for a long while after what Brexit meant. Nearly five years and two prime ministerial resignations later, Boris Johnson has finally defined it. Set against the perils of breaking up with no trade deal, having an agreement at all merits celebration. Apart from the economic costs and reputational d

For obvious reasons, 2020 will not go down as a good year. At the same time, it has brought more scientific progress than any year in recent memory -- and these advances will last long after COVID-19 as a major threat is gone. Two of the most obvious and tangible signs of progress are the mRNA vaccines now being distributed across America and around the world. These vaccines appear to have very high levels of efficacy and safety, and they can be produced more quickly than more conventional vacc

This column is about a massive cyberattack and a pair of poisoned underpants that lead to a giant question: Can Joe Biden figure out how to handle Vladimir Putin’s Russia after President Donald Trump leaves town? Trump is ignoring the just-discovered hack of federal government and much of corporate America by Moscow, even as he still claims the Russia hack of the 2016 election was “a hoax.” Never mind that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has named Russia as the culprit. Trump b

I have been working from home for most of the last two weeks after the government implemented the Level 2.5 social distancing scheme. During the period, I have stepped outside the house on three occasions -- once to a department store and once to a bookstore to get Christmas presents that could not be bought online and then once more to buy wrapping paper. Each outing was a brief affair, dashing in and out of the store after getting what I needed. No lingering and browsing. So, I may not be ent

As 2020 draws to a close, a loud sigh will be heard around the world. But the daunting battle against the COVID-19 pandemic remains. It is as widespread and deadly as ever, a situation unimaginable on New Year’s Eve last year, when China first informed the World Health Organization about a “pneumonia of unknown cause” spreading in Wuhan. The Johns Hopkins University tally, so far, has counted more than 76 million cases and some 1.7 million deaths around the planet. Just-relea

Joe Biden is going to have a lot of complicated issues competing for his attention when he takes office next month. Among the thorniest is Iran. During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to revive President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with the Tehran regime. That’s the one President Donald Trump denounced as toothless and abandoned in 2018. Since then, Trump has imposed ever more punishing economic sanctions on Iran, but they haven’t caused Iran to bend to his wil

In the Persian version of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, the frog is replaced by a turtle, but the rest of the tale is familiar. The turtle is stung even as it is doing the scorpion a good turn -- ferrying it across a river -- and is told, by way of explanation, that this is merely an expression of the arachnid’s nature. The moral of that tale may finally be dawning on European leaders who have been keeping the Islamic Republic from falling into the water for the past four years.

Christmas is just around the corner, but sadly, this year Santa Claus may not be able to come due to the pandemic. Still, however, we should be grateful for his lifetime of service to children, coming all the way from the North Pole every Christmas. The Bible teaches us to be grateful, saying we should be “thankful in everything, in all circumstances,” in 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Yet these days, so many of us are constantly grumpy and cranky, complaining instead of being thankful. In

The election of Joe Biden produced a huge sigh of relief in Europe. “Welcome back America!” tweeted Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. “Let’s work together!” exclaimed French President Emmanuel Macron. And it wasn’t just in France, but all over Europe that leaders welcomed the news that the White House would soon be occupied by someone who would want to work with them -- in contrast to Donald Trump, who had openly disdained the allies and declared the European Union a

When King Louis XVI, his two brothers and his sister-in-law were inoculated against smallpox in 18th-century France, the public worried about the risks. Though the experiment was a success, even sparking a new type of hairstyle, the doubts never went away. As vaccines took off during the 19th century, the age of Pasteur, so did resistance, apathy and distrust. A similar challenge faces French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s holed up in the Elysee Palace after testing positive for COVID-1

While much of Joe Biden’s first term in office will involve digging out from the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, the incoming president has also vowed to change the way the US manages its supply chains. This is framed as a way to make America more resilient in the face of crises after struggling to secure much-needed protective and medical materials in the early days of the coronavirus. But it’s obvious that his supply-chain policy centers on weaning the US and its allies off China