Helmut Sorge
| Posted : June 16, 2020
In times of shadow and despair, populists and authoritarians move in to undermine free speech and democracy. For authoritarian-minded leaders, wrote Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, writing in the New York Review of Books, “the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power. Censorship in China and elsewhere has fed the pandemic, helping to turn a potentially containable threat into a global calamity. The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic government’s dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies”.
Abdelhak Bassou
| Posted : June 15, 2020
La Covid-19, menace conjoncturelle en dépit des impacts néfastes attendus, ne doit pas nous détourner complètement de menaces en phase de devenir structurelles et menacer toute une région dans son existence. Le terrorisme au Sahel et dans la région du Lac Tchad s’est avéré résilient face aux efforts jusqu’à présent déployés. Non seulement il n’a pas été vaincu au Sahel mais il avance vers son objectif final : atteindre l’Atlantique à travers les pays côtiers de l’Afrique de l’Ouest.
Uri Dadush
| Posted : June 12, 2020
The United States has suffered more COVID-19 casualties than any other country and continues to report large numbers of new cases and deaths, and – as evident recently in stock markets – investors remain extremely sensitive to the epidemic’s shifting trends. As every state reopens, including most recently the New York epicenter, the fates of the American economy and of the global economy depend on whether the United States has put the worst of the epidemic behind it, or whether it will be forced to reclose in the face of a resurgence of infections. We assess the risks by drawing on the record of countries that appear to be reopening successfully so far.
Helmut Sorge
| Posted : June 12, 2020
She is just seventeen. An African-American high-school student. If Darnella Frazier had not turned on her cellphone on May 25, when she witnessed four police officers arresting a black man in Minneapolis, the world would never have known how George Floyd died that day, or why. A convenience store employee had called the police, accusing Mr Floyd of buying cigarettes with a fake $20 bill. Possibly Mr Floyd resisted arrest, which did not result in a “medical incident” as the police initially claimed, but allegedly in his murder. Frazier’s video proves that one officer put a knee on the neck of the arrested man. George Floyd said repeatedly “I can‘t breathe”, but there was no mercy.
Helmut Sorge
| Posted : June 11, 2020
When the cruise ship the MS Braemar in March had coronavirus cases confirmed on board, it struggled to find somewhere to dock. The Americans turned it away, as did the Bahamas. But another nation, just 200 miles off the U.S. coast, accepted the desperate Braemar. Cuba allowed it to berth in Puerto Mariel, 40 kilometers west of the capital, Havana. Within a day, in cooperation with the British government, Cuban medical teams accompanied more than 680 passengers to Havana airport and evacuated them to Britain.
نزار الفراوي
| Posted : June 11, 2020
شكلت جائحة كوفيد 19 تحديا غير مسبوق بالنسبة للإعلام المغربي بمختلف منابره المكتوبة والمسموعة والمرئية والإلكترونية. كان السؤال يطرح إشكالية تنشيط آليات إعلام أزمات في بلد لم يشهد الجيل الصحافي الممارس به أزمة سابقة تكرس تقليدا وتشحذ مهارات وتبني ذاكرة خبرة للتعاطي مع حالة استعجالية من هذا الحجم، ومن هذا النوع.
أياما قبل تسجيل الحالة الوافدة الأولى للفيروس، كان المغاربة يتناقلون أخبار الوباء من القنوات الفضائية العالمية بشكل أقرب إلى أعاجيب تحدث في بلاد بعيدة، إلى أن حل الوباء بالبلاد، فكانت العودة "الإجبارية" نحو الفاعل الإعلامي المغربي لمتابعة تطورات الخطر الذي يطرق الباب.
Otaviano Canuto
| Posted : June 10, 2020
Three features of the post-pandemic global economy can already be anticipated: the worldwide rise in public and private debt levels, accelerated digitization, and a partial reversal of globalization. The first arises from the public sector's role as the ultimate insurer against catastrophes, government policies to smooth pandemic curves and the coronavirus recession. These will leave a legacy of massive public-sector debt worldwide (as discussed in a previous post. Lower tax revenues and higher social and health expenditures reflect the choice of trying to avoid widespread destruction of people's productive and livelihood capacity during the pandemic. On the private-sector side, indebtedness will be the way to survive the sudden stop, if the result is not to be bankruptcy or closure.
Abdelhak Bassou
| Posted : June 09, 2020
Sur le ‘’rideau baissé’’ du globe terrestre, une pancarte avec une phrase : ‘’fermé pour raison de travaux’’. La pancarte n’indique aucune date de réouverture.
A l’intérieur, personne ne sait encore à quoi ressemblera le monde à la réouverture. Le temps presse. Aucune vision n’est encore dégagée et personne ne peut s’engager sur une date de reprise des activités ni sur la maquette du monde à venir. Certains proposent de rouvrir en 2021, mais les six mois qui restent sont à peine suffisants pour l’exécution des transformations, d’autant plus que celles-ci ne sont pas encore conçues. Non pas parce qu’on manque d’idées, mais parce que les auteurs de ces idées ne trouvent pas de consensus sur celle qui devra être exécutée.
Silvia Pariente-David
| Posted : June 09, 2020
“NEVER LET A SERIOUS CRISIS GO TO WASTE”
President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (2008)
after Sir Winston Churchill (mid-1940s)
Fathallah Oualalou
| Posted : June 05, 2020
الهلع (la sidération) كانت من أكثر الكلمات المستعملة من طرف المعلقين في حديثهم عن المشاعر الفردية والجماعية التي رافقت حياة البشر خلال مرحلة تفشي وباء كوفيد 19.
