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Qatar 2022

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Asia

Entertainment & Arts

Qatar 2022

SCMP
Asia

Opinion

Columnists

22. John J. Metzler

COVID-19 gloom shadows world

As the New Year brings hope and possibility for a global reset and renewal, the tragic reality remains that the COVID-19 virus, with all its deadly variants, continues to plague the planet now fully two years after the malady emerged from Wuhan, China. Thus, despite much justified optimism over wider vaccinations, the pandemic has not broken its deadly grip on societies, economies nor the collective psychology of most people.

2022-01-10 16:52

Looking ahead at 2022

The political reverberations following America's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan still shake the geopolitical landscape, from Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait. But shall military calculations in Moscow and Beijing take advantage of a perceived power vacuum in the wake of the Afghan fiasco or will diplomacy deflect the sword of aggression?

2021-12-29 17:00

Shadow of Pearl Harbor

The thunderclap came on an early Sunday morning. Amidst the idyllic and serene Pacific setting of Hawaii, Imperial Japan launched a surprise and devastating attack on the U.S. fleet moored at Pearl Harbor, outside Honolulu.

2021-12-15 17:00

Taliban war booty exceeds most countries military spending

When the Taliban forces overran Afghanistan a few months ago, not only did they capture a country continuously in conflict since the initial Soviet invasion in 1979, but they equally seized huge stockpiles of American supplied weapons provided to the defeated Afghan military. The unexplained and reckless U.S. pullout from the strategic Bagram Airbase, a lynchpin of allied operations and resupply, fell into the Taliban's waiting hands like a ripe Central Asian Pomegranate.

2021-12-06 16:58

Migrants as pawns in Putin's hybrid warfare

The setting is remote. The players are highly improbable. Yet, in the deep and forgotten forests along the Belorussian-Polish frontier, thousands of migrants from as far off as Syria, Iraq and even Afghanistan are amassing and milling about trying to enter Poland. Why? Because Poland forms the easternmost frontier of the European Union (EU), and thus becomes a path to freedom and prosperity in Germany or elsewhere in Europe.

2021-11-23 17:05

North Korea's human rights and COVID-19 crackdowns

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic combined with a shroud of secrecy and indifference has hidden the fast deteriorating human rights situation in North Korea. Now yet another report by the U.N.'s Rapporteur on Human Rights in the quaintly titled Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), underscores a grim reality in the “communist” country.

2021-11-15 17:15

China's rights abuses in Xinjiang slammed by UN committee

China's ongoing human rights abuses against its Muslim minority in Xinjiang have again been chastised by a key U.N. committee. Forty three countries strongly condemned the Beijing regime's widespread human rights violations against the Uyghur minority in what has become a systematic state policy in China's western Xinjiang region.

2021-11-01 17:05

US returns to UN's Human Rights Council

The United States has been elected to the United Nations' Human Rights Council, the controversial human rights assembly that the Biden administration rejoined earlier in the year. In uncontested elections, or should we say “selections,” Washington won a spot along with 17 other states, ranging from free nations, including Finland and Lithuania, to failed states such as Somalia, and even serial rights abusers, as is Eritrea.

2021-10-25 17:00

Beijing's dangerous bullying of free Taiwan

Beijing's communists are good at bullying. Look at the political crackdowns in prosperous Hong Kong, the suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and of course China's ongoing military harassment of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island which the communists claim to be part of the People's Republic of China.

2021-10-18 16:08

Berlin blues; German election after Merkel

Angela Merkel is leaving the political stage. After 16 years as Germany's chancellor presiding over amazing growth and stability, her Christian Democratic coalition CDU/CSU hardly gained from her political coattails in the recent national elections. Rather her Christian Democrats suffered their biggest electoral drubbing since 1949. Part of the outcome rests with an uninspiring national campaign and a lackluster candidate.

2021-10-12 16:46

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