Month: April 2022

The global supply chain is in hot water. The pandemic has made it notoriously difficult for shoppers to buy certain consumer goods, from home appliances and furniture to laptops and bicycles. And things aren’t getting better anytime soon, at least not this year. Shipments have been delayed, raw materials are in short supply, and businesses…

In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent. The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan….

By removing all troops from Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks’ 20th anniversary, President Joe Biden sent a none-too-subtle message: He wanted America, and the world, to see that he was turning the page — that the war on terror era was well and truly over. In a speech last week justifying his decision, he…

September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the…

America’s evacuation of Afghanistan is over. But that doesn’t mean the US has fulfilled its obligation to vulnerable Afghans, some of whom are still trapped in their home country. Even if the decision to withdraw from the country was ultimately the right one, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived…

The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own. Over the week of June 30, Arizona reported 55 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people per day. That’s 34 percent more than the second-worst state, Florida….

When will an effective Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine be ready for production for the general public? Some top US health officials and researchers now expect one will be approved for use in less than a year. The specific estimates vary, but they say that the current push for a Covid-19 vaccine is unmatched in its scale…

Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19. In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well. In Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, for example, there have been at least 80 positive cases since August 3, and more than…

One month ago, I asked epidemiologist Tara Smith if she was worried about states loosening their stay-at-home orders, despite most not meeting the government’s criteria for doing so. “I am really fearful that by June 1 or June 15, after we’ve seen a couple weeks to a month of [state reopenings], that our cases are…

As polling almost unanimously (over)predicted, Joe Biden has amassed the electoral votes necessary to become the 46th president of the United States. The outlook for global warming has consequently been upgraded from hopeless to merely very desperate. Without the Senate, which will likely remain in Republican hands (though control could come down to two runoffs…