Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. June 2, 2021 The Netanyahu Era Could Be Over Having reached an agreement by Wednesday's deadline to form a new coalition government, an amalgamation of right-wing, centrist, and Arab political parties is on the cusp of doing what no other grouping could, in the last 12 years: oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board argued poignantly that Israel's new government-in-waiting—which must be approved by a vote of confidence in the Knesset—probably won't change the country's direction on big issues like Palestinian statehood. Moria Kor writes for Israel Hayom that incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in a speech this week, mostly "changed the tone of the discourse, and offered a form of right-wing hope, more professional and less noisy … On social media, one can see glimpses of settlers who aren't afraid to speak well of him."
At YNetNews (affiliated with the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth), Ovad Yehezkel portrays the anti-Netanyahu movement as mostly an internal affair among the Prime Minister's former allies who simply became discontent with his managerial style. As for what ousting Netanyahu will accomplish, the editorial board of Haaretz acknowledges it's not really about ideology: "Only a man who has disgusted people so deeply could have brought together people from all parts of the political spectrum," the paper writes. The new governing coalition, it concludes, may not even survive for long.
If the change in leadership won't prompt big changes in policy, The New York Times' Patrick Kingsley, Isabel Kershner and Adam Rasgon write that Palestinians aren't expecting it to. Israel is moving on from Netanyahu, they write, but for Palestinians, the focus is on their own tectonic shift, as young Palestinians move the center of gravity away from decades-long calls for statehood and toward calls for equal rights. Will China's Three-Child Policy Work? China rolled back its infamous, so-called "one-child" policy in 2016, and now Beijing will allow Chinese families to have up to three children, a response to declining birth rates reported in the country's decennial census, released in May. (As Fareed noted on Sunday's GPS, we're in the midst of a global baby bust that threatens the future of the global economy, as working populations age into retirement.)
Will China's policy change produce more children? That "remains open to question," Hao Zhou writes for the South China Morning Post. "… After the introduction of the two-child policy, the number of births did increase, slightly, in 2016 and 2017. However, this was only a temporary phenomenon, as the number later fell significantly." Young Chinese people may feel too economically strapped to start larger families, The Economist writes: "'Do they not yet know that most young people are exhausted just supporting themselves?' commented one netizen on Weibo, a Twitter-like site … The high cost of housing and education, as well as the crushingly long work hours common in many companies, deter young couples from having any more than one child, or reproducing at all." The Covid-19 'Winner's Curse' After rating among the top global performers against Covid-19, some places in Southeast Asia are seeing an uptick: Taiwan is witnessing a spike in community spread, and "total cases in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and East Timor have all more than doubled in the past month," Reuters reported this week.
These governments and societies now face a Covid-19 "winner's curse," James Crabtree writes for Nikkei Asia, in that they must figure out how to transition from blocking the virus at all costs to managing Covid-19's enduring presence, given that some scientists predict the virus will become endemic, simmering at low levels but never really going away.
"Once they reach high levels of vaccination, the likes of Australia and Taiwan are eventually likely to have to drop their suppression strategies," Crabtree writes. "This means abandoning near-perfect COVID records in order to reopen economically, and in effect letting in COVID voluntarily. Managing this transition, and explaining it to their publics, will not be easy. There are signs that this rethink is already underway. … In a national address on May 31, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong talked about a 'new normal' of far more regular COVID testing, which could also be part of a changed COVID management approach." Wet Market, Lab, or Slow Burn? Amid a resurgence of concern that Covid-19 may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, epidemiologist Maureen Miller floats a different theory at The Conversation, suggesting Covid-19 could have evolved from a coronavirus that jumped to humans well before late 2019.
Noting that her "team worked with virologist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to develop a human antibody assay to test for a very distant cousin of SARS-CoV-2 found in bats"—that institute being the lab at the center of the leak theory—Miller writes that coronaviruses often jump from animals to humans and then evolve over time, causing symptoms but not reaching epidemic status until they've adapted. "[T]he next pandemic threat is likely already making its way through the population right now," Miller suggests. |
