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by Roland Hureaux*
(31 December 2020) It takes rare thoughtlessness to claim – as the majority of the European and American press, as well as Biden's supporters in the US presidential election, do – that Trump's defeat will save democracy.
by M. K. Bhadrakumar*
The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov remarked last week that Moscow expects nothing good in relations with a “deeply hostile” US under the incoming administration of Joe Biden. He further said in an interview with the Interfax published Thursday December 24, “We are heading from bad to worse. The next US president has been left with a bad legacy and it will take a long time for him to sort this out.”
“Abort the exercise”: This is what more and more politicians, trade unionists and even new business committees are calling for
by Niklaus Ramseyer
(24 January 2021) “Swiss Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, Department of Foreign Affairs, must now find the reset button he wanted to press at the beginning of his term of office as soon as possible.” That's what the new president of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and Ticino national councillor Marco Chiesa said early this year in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung about the draft institutional agreement between Switzerland and the EU. Chiesa's demand is only logical – and not new: His party was and is fundamentally opposed to the agreement.
Chronicle of an announced crisis
by Robert Seidel
(30. January 2021) In his latest book, Paul Schreyer* attempts to put the Covid-19 crisis in a political context and thus make it more tangible. In doing so, he goes back a long way in the history of US military "biosecurity".
by Pascal Boniface, geopolitologist, Director of The French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs IRIS
Kishore Mahbubani is Singaporean. But unlike the vast majority of his compatriots, he is not of Chinese origin. He is Sindhi Hindu, a Hindu population originally from Pakistan. In 1947, his parents fled the persecutions that accompanied the partition between India and Pakistan to take refuge in Singapore, where he was born in 1948. He was a diplomat, notably at the United Nations. He is now a professor at the University. He is one of the most influential commentators on international life.
Ed. How much is a billion? A sum of money of "only" one billion — or a thousand million — is hardly imaginable. One can only guess at the in uence and power that individuals in our world can wield with the possession of several or even hundreds of billions of dollars.
As a comparison with the amounts of money described in the following two articles by Alan MacLeod and Chuck Collins, we have subsequently compared this year's financial requirements of the "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees" (UNHCR) and the state revenues (2017) of Switzerland and its neighbouring countries.