Search Results for: coronavirus

‘From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate’: Have Liu Xiaobo’s fears been realized? 

     

Liberal Senator @SenPaterson says China’s threat to impose “economic sanctions” on Australia if it conducts an independent inquiry into the source of the coronavirus shows the Chinese Communist Party is “extremely… Read more »

Is partisanship driving pandemic polarization?

     

Reuters Institute analyst J. Scott Brennen draws on sample of 225 pieces of misinformation rated false or misleading by fact-checkers, drawn from a collection maintained by First Draft, to explain… Read more »

COVID-19’s regime-type fallacy: Autocrats also feeling strain

     

The novel coronavirus is compounding preexisting threats to press freedoms around the world, according to a new report by the international watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders, ABC News reports: Reporters… Read more »

A post-pandemic democratic renaissance?

     

  As leading authoritarian states exploit that Covid-19 pandemic to pursue a strategy of “co-option, coercion, and concealment,” as H.R. McMaster has summarized it, the old liberal order may rapidly… Read more »

China’s ‘hub and spoke strategy’: COVID-19 geopolitical turning point?

     

COVID-19 signals a global paradigm shift because even before the pandemic, the world was already in the grips of a far-reaching transformation, analyst Ullrich Fichtner writes for Der Spiegel. The… Read more »

‘Beginning of the end’ for Hong Kong? Two systems ‘dead as a Dodo’

     

Hong Kong activists are planning to take advantage of forthcoming opportunities to counter the recent crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. “We’re only at half-time in the match,” one activist suggested…. Read more »

COVID-19 pandemic reveals malfeasance, misrule & maladroit propaganda  

     

In the absence of global democratic leadership, China is taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to proclaim the superiority of its authoritarian model, notes Keith B. Richburg, director of the… Read more »

Autocratic assertion meets democratic dereliction

     

The coronavirus pandemic must not be used as a pretext for authoritarian states to trample over individual human rights, or repress the free flow of information, the UN secretary general… Read more »

Pandemic of power grabs: Autocrats’ opportunity in disaster

     

Even as some leaders exploit the COVID-19 pandemic, their inability to deal with popular suffering will act against the myth that they and their regimes are impregnable, the Economist observes…. Read more »