In March, when the Ever Given had stopped up the Suez, Russian officials invited shipping companies to consider the Arctic. Send your cargo from Asia to Europe through the Northern Sea Route, they urged. It knocks 4,000 nautical miles off the Suez journey, and the route grows freer and freer of ice every year.
The first successful oil drilling expedition in the Arctic nearly began in outright failure.
The great melt | The science of melt | Jostling nations | What could possibly go wrong?
Last year, Covax, the facility set up by the World Health Organization and several non-profits to deliver Covid-19 vaccines to developing countries, aimed to secure and distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. By mid-May, though, Covax had shipped out only 68 million doses—a result of various vaccine nationalisms, and skyrocketing demand for vaccines and vaccine supplies.
Over nearly two decades, a new study has found, government agencies have given at least £175 million ($248 million) to develop ChAdOx, a vaccine delivery system developed by scientists at Oxford University. Charities like the Wellcome Trust have given at least a further £53 million. As much as 99% of the total disclosed funding for ChAdOx research came from public or philanthropic money. And yet ChAdOx now sits at the heart of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, and the company is free to profit from it at will.
President Joe Biden’s declaration of support for the suspension of intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines is a major, even unprecedented step. But it doesn’t guarantee what sort of waivers will eventually be negotiated—or when.
For years, India has made and exported more vaccines than any other country. Yet its vaccination drive against Covid-19, which began in early January, is stumbling and faltering.
The disposable income of Americans rose by 67%, compounded annually, during the first quarter of 2021—the largest such jump ever recorded. But this wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic relief bills passed in December and March, which disbursed relief payments and topped up unemployment benefits.
Hi Quartz member,
President Joe Biden is asking Congress for $80 billion to beef up the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and its enforcement abilities. As an investment, it’s a doozy: Biden’s government expects a strengthened IRS to mop up an additional $700 billion in otherwise lost tax revenue over the next decade.
With every day, the number of Covid-19 cases in India rises steeply. On April 20, when prime minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation on television, India registered nearly 300,000 new cases and 2,000 deaths. Yet Modi did not announce a national lockdown; in fact, he said: “We have to save the country from a lockdown.”
In February, weeks after president Joe Biden took office, he announced $4 billion in funds for Covax, a multilateral drive backed by the World Health Organization to pay for vaccines for developing countries. Last week, Anthony Blinken, the US secretary of State, headlined an online fundraiser to rustle up an additional $2 billion from private donors. “This isn’t just an opportunity,” Blinken said, “it’s an imperative.”
In the wake of Brexit, at least 440 banks and financial services companies are moving some part of their operations and managed assets from London to cities in Europe, according to an analysis by New Financial, a London think-tank. But even as London’s status as Europe’s capital of finance is dimming, no other European city as yet stands to replace it, said William Wright, the founder of New Financial.
The best broadband in the US isn’t in New York or San Francisco. It’s in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And it’s owned by the city’s government—which makes it a shining case study for president Joe Biden’s push to have more municipal authorities build and run internet infrastructure.
Twitch may have started off as a platform for vicariously consumed spectacle—for watching other people shoot zombies or race cars as they played video games. When the pandemic locked people down in their homes last year, viewership doubled. But mostly, users were logging on for the far less dramatic sight of watching people sit in front of their webcams and talk.
The world is running short of semiconductor chips—running so short that Subaru has temporarily closed a plant in Japan, 5G network rollouts are delayed, Apple is worried about production hiccups, and new PlayStation 5s are nearly impossible to find. The reason for the shortfall may be plain to see—production slowdowns during the pandemic, compounded by booming demand for consumer technology—but the shortfall itself shows the stunning ubiquity of the chip today, and the dense complexity of the supply chains that produce it.
The first question asked on Yahoo! Answers, after its public launch on Dec. 08, 2005, was: “How do I decide on a good magic set for children (about 8 years old)? Ideally, less than $50.” This is, at the very least, correct according to the collective wisdom of Yahoo! Answers itself.
The UK is “a model for other white-majority countries.” That’s according to the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which published its delayed report on March 31, concluding additionally—to immediate anger and derision—that the UK experiences no institutional racism. The commission found anecdotal evidence of racist acts, its chair Tony Sewell told the BBC. “However, evidence of actual institutional racism? No, that wasn’t there, we didn’t find that.”
As countries slowly reopen after the pandemic, governments are edging closer to the implementation of some form of vaccine passport: certificates for travelers in the EU, credentials to attend sports games or take cruises in the US, or passports for the 47,200-odd pubs in the UK.
President Joe Biden’s promise to make college free is well-reasoned. A strong welfare system that includes free tuition can alleviate income inequality and improve social mobility. Just look, for example, at Denmark. But this kind of welfare isn’t enough to improve educational outcomes from one generation to the next.
For the most anticipated earnings event of the year to date, GameStop’s call with analysts on Tuesday night was something of a damp squib.
In Brazil, two long-gone and much-denounced Austrian economists are experiencing a curious swell of fame. This newfound popularity makes for an unusually clear case study—of how ideas from the fringe slide into the mainstream through deliberate dispersal but also through the fortunes of timing and political fluctuations.
In a four-day auction, the owner of an art gallery specializing in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) paid Quartz 1 Ethereum ($1,800) for the first-ever news article sold as an NFT. The proceeds of the sale will be contributed to the Lauren Brown Fellowship at the International Women’s Media Foundation, which supports women journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.
Lumber is in such short supply in the US that its prices have skyrocketed to an all-time high—so much so that the expense of building the average single-family home has risen by $24,000 since last April to reflect the cost of wood.
