The Coronavirus Pandemic: All of WPR’s Coverage Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. African leaders used this week’s virtual United Nations General Assembly to call for international support to help their economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic, pressing for debt cancellation and up to $100 billion in annual support over the next three years. From a health perspective, the continent appears to have withstood the pandemic better than many experts predicted, registering just 5 percent of global cases and 3.6 percent of deaths. But economies across Africa have been battered by the extraordinary measures that […]

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allure to Israeli voters is perhaps best embodied in three election campaign posters that adorned the 15-story headquarters of his Likud party in Tel Aviv last year. Each depicted him alongside a major world leader: U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi, under the slogan: “Netanyahu: Another League.” The message: Netanyahu, and Netanyahu alone, makes Israel punch above its weight on the world stage. The normalization agreements Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain last week should have unambiguously reinforced this image. Even Netanyahu’s most dogged critics have difficulty faulting […]

In late April, Luca Esposito was reflecting, like many of us, on how the coronavirus pandemic had upended his family’s life. Esposito wrote in a blog post that his elderly father in southern Italy had turned to WhatsApp to order groceries, because he could no longer visit the store in person; that his children’s school had struggled to adapt to the demands of online learning; and how remote working, once a privilege of senior managers, in his view could become the norm. As the executive director of the World Lottery Association, or WLA, a lobby group that represents national, state […]

Among the remarkable, unexpected developments during the coronavirus pandemic is one that may seem arcane to most people, but is nevertheless loaded with significance: the steep drop in the strength of the U.S. dollar. Fluctuations in currency markets respond to multiple factors, to be sure, but the effectiveness of government policy is unquestionably one of them. A close look at the behavior of currency markets over the past six months strongly suggests that the sinking fortunes of the once-reliable greenback represent a global vote of no-confidence in the actions of the current U.S. government. Early in the pandemic, financial markets […]

Millions of children headed back to school this week, but the environment they’ve returned to is anything but familiar. Those in classrooms are facing radically different health and safety protocols, while many others are still confined to their homes, using remote tools to communicate with their teachers and classmates. This week on the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Elliot Waldman was joined by Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, to discuss how COVID-19 is changing the face of education. Winthrop and her colleagues have found that the pandemic is exposing new […]

Education has traditionally been viewed as humanity’s great equalizer, providing children from less privileged backgrounds with the tools they need to achieve greater degrees of financial security and success in their chosen fields. Unfortunately, education can serve to entrench socio-economic disparities just as much as it alleviates them. That has become all too clear in recent months, as the families and schools with the greatest resources, both financial and technological, look to be the ones best-prepared to weather the coronavirus pandemic. But according to Rebecca Winthrop, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, […]

When al-Qaida targeted the centers of American financial and military power on 9/11, it believed that most of the world would welcome seeing the United States knocked down from its perch of power. Whether by accident or by design, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader and founder, had formulated his strategy based on an interpretation of classical realist theory, predicting that countries seeking to balance against American hegemony would be disinclined to get involved in any conflict that followed the attacks. Instead, while the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoldered, leaders around the world pledged their […]

When Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to power as prime minister in July last year, he had a familiar pitch to Greeks. In opposition to the populist, left-wing government under the Syriza party, he offered an economically liberal and technocratic program that would attract foreign investment and do away with many of the ailments that have plagued Greece’s state machinery for decades. A year later, though, things are not where Mitsotakis hoped they would be. The COVID-19 pandemic derailed not just his economic plans, but the global economy as a whole. He now faces some all-too familiar economic and political problems in […]

Across West Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing back painful memories of the Ebola epidemic, which spread from the remote forest region in Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone, infecting over 28,000 people and claiming the lives of more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. As the region grapples with a new virus, have civil society groups and policymakers applied the lessons they learned from Ebola to the fight against COVID-19? Or are West African countries repeating the same fatal mistakes? With so much public mistrust of the governments in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, local human rights groups and […]

It was probably just a matter of time before Bolivia’s response to the coronavirus became viscerally polarized. With an unelected interim government appearing to overstep its mandate and repeatedly pushing back new elections, and an opposition embittered by the ousting of the previous president, Evo Morales, over alleged electoral fraud, the Andean nation was already desperately divided before being hit by the pandemic. Now, however, Bolivia is mired in a partisan fight over who is responsible for the deaths of COVID-19 patients due to dire shortages of oxygen in hospitals. The trigger came last month when supporters of Morales blockaded […]