If the 2016 presidential election taught us anything, it's that only fools make predictions. So let's give it a go! In this episode of GZERO World, Ian Bremmer poses a basic question: If Joe Biden wins the presidency how would he reshape U.S. foreign policy? Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as a top State Department official under President Obama and now runs the think tank New America, weighs in.
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Dating and debates, music festivals and dance classes, work and education – an increasing amount of our social interactions now take place online. With this shift to virtual venues, ensuring kindness and respect in everyday interactions and encounters is more important than ever.
The digital space has become a fundamental part of the national and international conversation, and has also, at times, become a breeding ground for bullying, trolling and hate speech. There is a clear need for more "digital good" to ensure that online encounters have a constructive impact on everyone involved. To learn more about digital good and what it means, visit Microsoft on the Issues.
As the global vaccination race heats up, the most populous country in the world is trying to do three very hard things at once.
India, grappling with the second highest confirmed COVID caseload in the world, recently embarked on what it called "the world's largest" coronavirus vaccination campaign, seeking to inoculate a sizable swath of its 1.4 billion people.
That alone would be a herculean challenge, but India is also making hundreds of millions of jabs as part of the global COVAX initiative to inoculate low-income countries. And as if those two things weren't enough, Delhi also wants to win hearts and minds by doling out millions more shots directly to other countries in its neighborhood.
<p>How will India pull off such a gargantuan task? It's still early days, but tough tradeoffs are already emerging fast. </p><p><strong>Domestic mistrust. </strong>When India launched its COVID vaccination campaign in January, many were hopeful. The country had both the capacity to mass-produce (India makes about 60 percent of all vaccines globally) and the <a href="https://scroll.in/article/975675/covid-19-can-india-adapt-its-child-immunisation-infrastructure-to-vaccinate-the-whole-population" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">logistical infrastructure</a> already in place to inoculate hundreds of millions of children against measles or tuberculosis annually. </p><p>But six weeks in, barely 1 percent of Indians have gotten their shots. Technical <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/covid-19-technical-glitch-hits-round-2-of-vaccination-drive/articleshow/80946735.cms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">glitches</a> are one reason. But another issue is widespread skepticism. Only 40 percent of Indians <a href="https://www.localcircles.com/a/press/page/vaccine-hesitancy-survey-india#.YD6nbpNKhBw" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">say</a> they want to be vaccinated, according to the pollster Local Circles. A <a href="https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/experts-flag-lack-of-transparency/article33495964.ece" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fishy</a> approvals process for India's own locally-developed vaccine contributed to that. Earlier this week Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-vaccine/modi-takes-home-grown-vaccine-as-india-widens-immunisation-drive-idUSKCN2AT15Q" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">took the jab</a> in a photo-op bid to boost public confidence. </p><p>There's also a basic supply constraint which is forcing India's government to balance competing priorities.</p><p><strong>Made in India vs India First. </strong>Global prospects for ending the pandemic depend heavily on India, which has <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/20/india-pharmacy-of-the-world-starts-exporting-covid-vaccines" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">committed</a> to producing hundreds of millions of vaccines for Oxford/AstraZeneca, under the local name Covishield. But balancing that global demand against Indians' needs is proving tough.</p><p>Delhi has already <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-global-trade-immunizations-india-coronavirus-pandemic-c0c881c0f07166e8fd494e078171a7cc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">warned</a> once that it would delay COVAX commitments until it had inoculated a critical mass of its own population. And although it walked that back a bit, two weeks ago the Serum Institute of India — the main <a href="https://www.gzeromedia.com/the-covax-state-of-play" target="_self">COVAX</a> supplier — <a href="https://www.gzeromedia.com/what-were-watching-status-of-covid-in-the-us-china-wants-a-reset-indian-vax-makers-under-pressure" target="_self">hinted</a> it was under pressure to prioritize India's "huge needs." </p><p><strong>One of those needs is vaccine "friendship." </strong>Prime Minister Modi calls his strategy <a href="https://www.news18.com/news/india/covid-diplomacy-how-indias-vaccine-maitri-jabs-have-put-china-on-the-ropes-3339179.html" target="_blank">"Vaccine Maitri,"</a> a Sanskrit word with Buddhist overtones that means friendship, goodwill, or kindness. Modi wants the world to see India as a <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/cricket/pm-narendra-modi-replies-to-former-england-cricketer-kevin-pietersen-says-we-believe-that-the-world-is-our-family-101612414023965.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">benevolent power</a>, using its vaccine manufacturing capacity to help countries in need.</p><p>Indeed, Delhi is set to ship shots to several nations in South Asia and beyond, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-vaccine-diplomacy/2021/01/21/0d5f0494-5b49-11eb-a849-6f9423a75ffd_story.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">often for free</a>. But Delhi's largesse has a geopolitical coloring too: India is sending jabs to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/india-seeks-to-mend-bangladesh-ties-with-vaccine-diplomacy" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bangladesh</a>, for example, as part of a strategy to mend ties with Dhaka after the fallout of India's controversial 2019 citizenship laws, which stoked tensions with the majority-Muslim country. Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, no Indian-made jabs are headed for the 200 million people of long-time adversary Pakistan.</p><p><strong>China is part of the story too.</strong> India's main rival for Asian supremacy is waging its own <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/58ca570e-38ee-404f-90f5-57c21c458058" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">complicated campaign</a> of vaccine diplomacy, sending millions of vaccines to <a href="https://www.gzeromedia.com/vaccine-diplomacy-china-in-the-global-south" target="_self">countries across the developing world</a>. Delhi wants to counter that, but is focusing closer to home: India is supplying millions of doses of Covishield to neighboring <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/international/536307-indias-covid-diplomacy-trying-to-wean-neighbors-off-china" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nepal</a>, where China's growing influence has been eroding India's sway in recent years, <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/sri-lanka-receives-500000-doses-of-covid-19-vaccines-from-india/article33933291.ece" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">and to Sri Lanka</a>, which is increasingly in play in the Asian rivalry between Beijing and Delhi. </p><p><strong>Bottom line:</strong> India has chosen to do three very difficult and somewhat conflicting things. Succeeding at any one of them alone would be an impressive step in the longer fight to end the pandemic. But can Delhi manage more than that?</p>
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Hard Numbers: Australia's farming woes, Texas' reopening, LGBTQ discrimination in South Korea, Americans mistrust China and Russia
March 03, 2021
26,000: Efforts by the Australian government to keep the pandemic at bay have harmed the country's agriculture sector, which relies on foreign workers to tend to crops and cultivate the land. Australia had a deficit of some 26,000 farmworkers because of entry restrictions in recent months, Agri businesses say, resulting in tens of millions of dollars worth of wasted crops.
<p><strong>13: </strong>Texas' governor said this week that he was ending the state's mask mandate and other COVID restrictions, <a href="https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1366846908480815106" target="_blank">tweeting</a> "Texas is OPEN 100%." This is despite the fact that Texas is among the top 10 US states with the fastest-growing COVID caseloads and has vaccinated just <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html" target="_blank">13 percent </a>of its 30 million people, the second lowest vaccination rate in the entire country. <br/><br/><strong>1: </strong>South Korea's<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56268409" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> first </a>transgender soldier, Byun Hee-soo, has been found dead at her home after being expelled from the military for undergoing gender reassignment surgery. The <a href="https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/same-sex-couples-excluded-south-koreas-new-definition-families" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LGBTQ community </a>in South Korea is often neglected by state institutions, and there are no national anti-discrimination laws in the country at all.<br/><br/><strong>20: </strong>Americans' views of China and Russia have plummeted in recent months, according to a new <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/331082/china-russia-images-hit-historic-lows.aspx" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gallup poll. </a>Only 20 percent of Americans now say that they have a favorable view of China (down 13 percentage points in a year), while 22 percent say the same of Russia (a 12-point drop).</p>
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When America's top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was last on GZERO World in the fall of 2019, just weeks before the pandemic hit, he saw the country's the anti-vax movement as concerning, but still a fringe issue. What a difference a year makes, with one in five Americans saying today that they're reluctant to take the COVID-10 vaccine. Why has vaccine hesitancy grown so much?
<p>One the many reasons Fauci offers: "One of the most common is they say, 'Well, it was so fast.' We always talk about vaccines requiring years to develop...And when we explain to people that this is just a reflection of the exquisite advances in the science of vaccine platform technology and immunogen technology...we can win more people over than you can imagine." Dr. Fauci also tackles the question of when, and how, to start exporting vaccines abroad. </p><p>Watch the GZERO World episode: <a href="https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-world-with-ian-bremmer/dr-faucis-pandemic-prognosis" target="_self">Dr. Fauci's Pandemic Prognosis</a> </p>
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Millions of people leave their home countries each year, fleeing conflict or violence, seeking better work opportunities, or simply to be closer to family. What proportion of those people are women? In many of the countries that are home to the largest migrant populations, a majority, in fact. While many women leave home for the same reasons as men (social instability or economic opportunity) gender-based violence or persecution often play a special role in women's decisions to pick up stakes and move. Here's a look at the gender breakdown of some of the world's largest migrant populations.
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Vaccine hesitancy at home and exporting vaccines abroad: Dr. Anthony Fauci
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