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This week the World Health Organization (WHO) held the 73rd annual World Health Assembly by teleconference instead of in Geneva, Switzerland. What made this meeting unique is the fact that it was held in the midst of “the worst pandemic in modern history,” which has most of the world locked down in quarantine (NPR, May 17, 2020).
In 2018, the last year for which accurate statistics are available, the marriage rate in the United States dropped to its lowest level since 1900 (Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 29, 2020). Just 6.5 out of 1,000 people got married in 2018, down from 7.0 in 2016. Many experts believe this number will continue to drop in future years.
During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan this year (April 23–May 23), mosques in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and several other American cities are publicly broadcasting the “call to prayer” five times a day (Al Jazeera, April 24, 20202).
The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on national economies around the world. In contrast to its January 2020 forecast of sizeable global economic growth, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now predicts a 3 percent reduction in global economic output (New York Times, April 14, 2020).
The EU has been struggling, and Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic have added insult to injury. European nations are acting independently in their battle against the virus, and some commentators have declared that this could be the end of the EU as we know it.
The BBC reports that the head of the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley, recently urged world leaders to act quickly and wisely: “We could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months.… The truth is we do not have time on our side” (April 21, 2020). He was referring to the deteriorating food situation in...
Over the last two months the world has changed dramatically! Streets and highways in cities around the world—from Paris and London to New York, and from Madrid to Los Angeles—became devoid of traffic almost overnight due to lockdown attempts to control the coronavirus.
Decades after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the now-shuttered nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, is in the news again. Thirty-four years ago, the plant’s reactor number 4 melted down. Since that time, the surrounding radioactive towns have been almost vacant, and the site has become a tourist attraction. In the last few weeks, a major forest...
Oil prices are plummeting, and for Middle Eastern nations that rely on oil revenues to support their economies, this is very bad news. Iraq’s 2020 budget assumes that oil’s average price for the year will be $56 (U.S. dollars) per barrel (The Spectator, April 4, 2020), yet oil has dropped to less than $20 per barrel (as of this writing) and continues to show...
“Whatever it takes” is the now-famous comment of Mario Draghi when he was the European Central Bank chairman. He was addressing the European debt crisis of 2012—and his sentiment is now shared by many world leaders and national governments as they attempt to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus shutdown of national economies (The Economist,...