Dominique Bocquet
| Posted : November 13, 2020
A la veille des ultimes négociations sur les « relations futures », un accord entre le Royaume-Uni et l’Union européenne (UE) paraît probable.
D’abord, Londres voit s’envoler l’appui américain : contrairement à Donald Trump, le président élu Joe Biden est défavorable au Brexit. Il a annoncé qu’un accord commercial USA-Royaume-Uni serait exclu si une « frontière dure » était rétablie entre les deux Irlandes. Or, c’est justement ce qu’impliquerait une sortie sans accord : l’Irlande du nord deviendrait un territoire extra-communautaire soumis à contrôles douaniers pour ses échanges avec Dublin.
Dominique Bocquet
| Posted : November 02, 2020
La perspective d’une victoire de Joe Biden s’est heurtée, jusqu’au bout, au scepticisme des observateurs, en raison du précédent de 2016 : ils n’avaient, alors, pas vu venir la défaite d’Hillary Clinton et le triomphe de Trump, en retard dans les sondages. Mais, l’élection de 2020 n’est pas celle de 2016.
Helmut Sorge
| Posted : October 29, 2020
Even if a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, there is unlikely to be a quick return to normality. Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s leading expert in infectious diseases dared a prediction: “We will know whether a vaccine is safe by the end of November, the beginning of December. The question is, once you have a safe and effective vaccine, or more than one, how can you get it to the people who need it as quickly as possible? You’ll have to wait several months into 2021 when you talk about vaccinating a substantial proportion of the population, so that you can have a significant impact on the dynamic of the outbreak. That very likely will not be into the second or third quarter”. Nine candidate vaccines are currently being evaluated for inclusion in the international COVAX Facility, which eventually will organize the global distribution and financing of chosen vaccines. But none of the giants, such as U.S. group Moderna (Phase III), Germany’s CureVac (Phase I), Institut Pasteur/Merck/Themis, an Austrian-American-French consortium (preclinical), or China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals (Phase I) have confirmed that their vaccine is ready to be distributed around the globe. “Rapid responses by governments, academia and industry”, noted Nature, “have already resulted in the production of more than 180 vaccine candidates, 42 of which are being tested in humans at the time of writing”.
Sabine Cessou
| Posted : October 28, 2020
“Out of the Eurocentric box”
This young planner and lecturer at the Departement of International Urbanism of the University of Stuttgart (Germany) spontaneously describes himself as a “Marrakchi, ambitious and curious” person. His birthplace and family’s influence matter a lot in his professional journey. Not only because the Red City is “an inspiring place for its history, architecture and culture”, but also because his grandfather was a well-established tile maker, who participated in the edification of many historical palaces in Marrakech
Helmut Sorge
| Posted : October 27, 2020
War has started again in the Caucasus, a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. It is a kind of mountainous border between Asia and Europe, in a region with vast oil resources that was conquered by Russia a few hundred years ago. The fighting that has erupted is over an enclave known as Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote territory without strategic value that is nevertheless, as writer Andrew Higgins concluded in the New York Times (October 4), “the center of the most enduring and venomous of the ‘frozen conflicts’ left by the collapse of the Soviet Union”. Nagorno-Karabakh has 100,000 inhabitants, predominantly Armenians, and is located within the borders of Azerbaijan and controlled by factions with close ties to Armenia’s capital Yerevan. Relations between the two former Soviet republics, which together have fewer than 13 million people, have been tense since 1991, when Armenian military forces occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, which is internationally-recognized as a territory of Azerbaijan, a mainly Muslim nation.
Otaviano Canuto
| Posted : October 23, 2020
We have previously discussed how, between March 2020, when the financial shock caused by COVID-19 occurred, and the end of August, the stock and corporate debt markets in the United States performed extraordinarily, despite gloomy prospects on the real side of the economy. The decline in technology stock prices in September ended up taking the equivalent of a month from gains starting in April, but prices remain high.
Sabine Cessou
| Posted : October 20, 2020
“Your environment, an opportunity for skills”
Born in Kenya, Vicky Ngari reluctantly followed her mother in the United Kingdom when she was 10. She didn’t want to leave Nairobi, where she nurtured as a child a fascination for clothes, garments and dancing. As the years passed, she never severed ties with Kenya, nor Africa.
In Brighton and London, she studied Film and TV, then creative writing, majoring in sociology and journalism. She realized during her first year at University that she could learn a lot out of experience, besides theorical knowledge in the classroom. « On the ground, I taught myself how to network », she says. At the time, she had two part-time jobs, working as a receptionist and at a gym. There, she discussed so much about styling with a fashion designer who came to exercise, that she got invited on a shoot.
Hamza M’jahed
| Posted : October 19, 2020
La Commission de l’Union européenne (UE) a présenté, le 23 septembre 2020, son Pacte sur la migration et l’asile, supposé être l’un des piliers de la nouvelle présidence de l’instance exécutive. Sur ce sujet, devenu quasi-existentiel pour l’UE, l’ambition est de repenser la stratégie migratoire européenne, en prônant une approche pragmatique et réaliste pour faire face à ce « défi » dont les enjeux divisent profondément l’Union, depuis l’afflux des réfugiés en 2015, qui a renforcé les contrôles aux frontières de l’UE et surchargé les systèmes migratoires d’États d’Europe méridionale.
Helmut Sorge
| Posted : October 08, 2020
The so-called QAnon conspiracy theory has inspired groups with millions of members on Facebook and is considered by some observers to be “a new American religion”. For the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, the conspiracy theorists could pose a domestic terrorist threat. Q followers believe the baseless messages of their faceless leader(s) that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child-trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a day of reckoning that will involve the mass arrest of journalists and politicians, the enemies of the people. QAnon supported Trump’s early opinion that COVID-19 was a hoax, that face masks are not needed, and that infected lungs could be cleared with industrial bleach. Q’s followers have also been informed that North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-Un is a puppet ruler installed by the CIA, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a granddaughter of Adolf Hitler. Other outlandish ideas about extraterrestrials and the British Royal family also proliferate, while members of the Hollywood elite are suspected of so-called adrenochrome harvesting, in which adrenaline is extracted from children’s blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome.
Hajar El Alaoui
| Posted : October 05, 2020
La pandémie de la Covid-19 a mis en exergue les limites de la « coopération internationale » et du multilatéralisme, cédant la place à une possible émergence de la coopération bilatérale, voire régionale, et à la mise en œuvre de Complexes régionaux de sécurité. La configuration actuelle du monde en fait un village global, où les Etats sont à l’image de leurs nations, plus connectés et interdépendants. Il est, certes, vrai que la mondialisation ne peut disparaître, mais peut, en revanche, être reconfigurée et adaptée aux nouvelles menaces bioterroristes.