This stinks. It stinks worse than any of the other carrion this government has buried. Every day for the past fortnight, I’ve been asking myself why this scandal isn’t all over the front pages. Under cover of the pandemic, the government has awarded contracts worth billions of pounds for equipment on which our [...]

The UK and the People’s Republic of China make an odd couple. In the “golden era” of bilateral relations, ushered in by David Cameron, the UK welcomed Chinese companies to invest in critical infrastructure such as 5G and nuclear power plants. But the Chinese ambassador has now threatened Britain with dire [...]

Last week, the Chinese government passed a broad national security law criminalising dissent in Hong Kong. While the law has already had a chilling effect on protests, the consequences for Hong Kong’s economy are unclear. Since 1 July, Hong Kong’s stock market has climbed. Some foreign businessmen in Hong Kong [...]

It’s been 15 weeks since I went into isolation to shield from Covid-19 – having cystic fibrosis (CF) put me in the high-risk category. I had expected this year to be a write-off but, after a devastating four months, 2020 may finally be looking [...]

Even before the pandemic came along, the world economy faced a set of deepening crises: a climate emergency, extreme inequality and huge disruption to the world of work, with robots and AI systems replacing [...]

The response to the spread of coronavirus that most Indians are talking about this week is not an innovation in contact tracing or a big increase in hospital beds, it’s the death of a father and son in judicial custody in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It happened after the local police picked them up for [...]

In April, Apple and Google announced a partnership. They would take research into how to undertake Bluetooth-powered Covid-19 contact tracing in a privacy-preserving manner, with no central database, and make it available as a toolkit inside their operating systems for public health authority–sanctioned apps. Before [...]

One in six Americans fall ill every year from the food they eat (according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). In Britain, it is one in 28. This week, the negotiations over the shape of the final relationship between Britain and the EU resume in earnest, making the next three or four months among [...]

It’s been Poland’s strangest presidential election campaign in living memory. Granted, it’s the first that’s taken place during a pandemic, but in the last three months the country hasn’t just experienced one of the strictest lockdown regimes around, it has seen a brutal political battle. The ruling Law and [...]

Courtrooms are cramped. Physical distancing needs space. How is the lockdown-exacerbated backlog of jury trials to be reduced as, moving on from the Cummings, Primark and Cherry on the Cake phases of its failsafe national plan, the Westminster government finds it is also safe to relaunch [...]