In The News

Global Food Crisis – Prices Soar, Crops Rot: WSJ

Yaroslav Trofimov and Lucy Craymer May 14, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic combined with protectionist restrictions has disrupted food processing and transportation, resulting in waste at farms and shortages in stores. Perishable vegetables and products like milk are at high risk, while prices for wheat, rice and other staples climb. The Wall Street Journal article offers numerous examples of food-chain disruptions and worries. The world confronts...

Habitat Destruction, Deforestation, Pandemics: CNBC

Emma Newburger May 12, 2020
Deforestation, climate change and other habitat destruction reduce biodiversity, bringing wild animals and humans closer along with infectious diseases. “The total number of disease outbreaks has more than tripled each decade since the 1980s,” reports Emma Newburger for CNBC. “More than two thirds of the diseases originated in animals and most of those were directly transmitted from wildlife to...

Right to Education: Dawn

Marvi Soomro May 12, 2020
Around the world, governments close schools to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and encourage teachers and parents to support ongoing studies. From primary school to university, lockdowns expose inequities in available technologies, parent capabilities and motivation, quiet spaces, books and other resources. “Major barriers like the digital divide and the weakness of education systems threaten to...

Green Tech, Covid-19 Hit Nuclear Power: Bloomberg

Lars Paulsson and Rachel Morison May 10, 2020
As electricity demand declined across the world due to Covid-19 lockdowns and economic contraction, renewable energies have taken a bigger share of the global energy market after many nations decided to give green technologies priority on the grid. The pandemic worsened the outlook for nuclear power stations, already struggling to break even. For many years, atomic reactors in Europe coexisted...

Tolerance of Cellphone Monitoring: Washington Post

Kareem Fahim, Min Joo Kim and Steve Hendrix May 8, 2020
In a few months, tens of millions of people around the world in at least 27 countries went under surveillance from governments, private companies and researchers without consent in order to trace the spread and contain the Covid-19 virus. Some people tolerate surveillance, agreeing that such measures are necessary to avoid a nationwide lockdown. However, the measures provoke debate in Europe and...

Battle Against the “Tsunami of Hate”: UN

António Guterres May 8, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has targeted vulnerable populations – initially striking cities while wielding disproportionate effect on nursing homes, prisons and other facilities where employees work in close quarters. These include US meat-processing facilities, often staffed with immigrant labor. Researchers suggest many of the deaths are due to disparities in health care, and the pandemic exposes...

Plunged Global Factory Output: Wall Street Journal

Paul Hannon and Tom Fairless May 7, 2020
Investors and policymakers regard the Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index, or PMI, as a leading indicator of economic activities. PMI above 50.0 implies a rise in activities, offering an optimistic forecast while a reading below that shows economic decline. With the wide spread of COVID-19 around the world and more countries joining the lockdown, PMI witnessed a sharp drop in April. In India...