Even a right-wing cabinet stocked with ultra-nationalists may not derail the deepening relationships
Día: 8 de enero de 2023
China is overwhelmed, yet an even bigger covid wave may be coming
The transition back to normal life is proving difficult
Outside the People’s Hospital of Dezhou, a small city in the coastal province of Shandong, an old woman on a stretcher, breathing quickly with her eyes closed, is unloaded from an ambulance. A few minutes later she is put back into it. Her family members start calling other hospitals. There is no room at this one.
Republicans struggle to elect a speaker of the House
American and British conservatives are distinct species. But in one respect—a cannibalistic impulse to kill and consume their leaders—they are similar. On January 3rd Kevin McCarthy, the Republican congressman who for the better part of a decade has yearned to be elected speaker of the House of Representatives, found himself on the receiving end. Though Republicans secured a narrow majority in midterm elections in November, a contingent of hardline congressmen have banded together to deny their party leader the absolute majority he needs to obtain the speakership.
Pope Benedict XVI was an iron fist in a white glove
Pattering in the forceful, tumultuous wake of John Paul II, Benedict XVI had a hard act to follow. In 2005 there were few expectations. Or rather, there were expectations of the wrong kind: that the man who from 1981 had been prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (cdf) would rule the Roman Catholic church like an elderly headmaster, waspish and intolerant, with the fires of a new Inquisition gleaming in those pale blue eyes.
Starlink’s performance in Ukraine has ignited a new space race
Never mind the moon; look to low-Earth orbit.
“IT’S A FACT: we’re in a space race.” So said Bill Nelson, the boss of NASA, on January 1st. If China managed to land on the Moon before America returned there, he warned, it could seize lunar resources for itself, and even tell America: “Keep out, we’re here, this is our territory.”
How China’s reopening will disrupt the world economy
For the better part of three years—1,016 days to be exact—China will have been closed to the world. Most foreign students left the country at the start of the pandemic. Tourists have stopped visiting. Chinese scientists have stopped attending foreign conferences. Expat executives were barred from returning to their businesses in China. So when the country opens its borders on January 8th, abandoning the last remnants of its “zero-covid” policy, the renewal of commercial, intellectual and cultural contact will have huge consequences, mostly benign.