Singapore on the winning side of Covid-19 fight

By Nile Bowie
As Southeast Asia struggles to contain a Covid-19 resurgence, Singapore has so far avoided the harsh fate of neighboring nations that have fallen ill to second waves of infection far deadlier than the first. But the island nation is determined not to become a victim of its virus-curbing success.

China leans on Pakistan to round up its Uighurs

By FM Shakil
Muslim Uighur families are fleeing China’s Xinjiang western province to avoid official persecution and taking refuge in neighboring Pakistan, a gathering exodus that is putting bilateral relations under new strain. Sources in Islamabad say they are under growing pressure from Beijing to round up and repatriate the Uighurs.

A bipolar currency order is closer than you think

Subscribe to AT+ premium to read William Pesek’s story on how the Chinese leadership’s rising tolerance for a strong yuan suggests the currency could soon rival the US greenback as a global reserve currency and perhaps even create a new power-sharing arrangement between the two biggest economies.

St Petersburg Forum maps out Eurasian century

By Pepe Escobar
It’s impossible to understand the finer points of what’s happening on the ground in Russia and across Eurasia, business-wise, without following the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum, happening now. Arguably the most eye-catching panel of the forum has been the one on the post-Covid-19 “new normal” (or abnormal).

Israel’s new rulers inimical to two-state solution

By Daniel Williams
For the past dozen years, Netanyahu’s coalitions relied on parties headed by politicians who once worked for him and now have abandoned him: Naftali Bennet, Benny Gantz, Gideon Saar and Avigdor Lieberman. They all backed his opposition to land-for-peace formulas and all supported settlement expansion.

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New Israel coalition gives Palestinians little hope

By Ian Parameter
Even by the standards of previous Israeli coalitions, the new government that’s just been announced includes strange bedfellows. For the first time in Israeli history, the coalition includes an Arab-Israeli party, Ra’am, whose four Knesset (parliament) seats enable the coalition to reach a majority.

India’s ‘Westernism’ caused its vaccine crisis

By M K Bhadrakumar
New Delhi put all its eggs in the Anglo-American vaccine basket and is only belatedly embracing Russia's Sputnik-V jab. But a full week after External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s extended four-day visit to the United States, India is still in the dark as to whether Biden administration will spare some of America’s surplus vaccines.

Formal probe needed to solve Covid origin riddle

By Virginie Courtier and Etienne Decroly
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid first appeared at the end of 2019.

India’s Wipro market cap exceeds 3 trillion rupees

By KS Kumar
Wipro Ltd has become the third Indian information technology firm to achieve the milestone of three trillion rupees (US$41 billion) in market capitalization. The firm’s stock hit a record high of 550 rupees in early trade on Thursday and the market capitalization stood at 3.01 trillion rupees.