Just two months ago, Indonesia was coming to a gasping India’s aid. Now, Jakarta is experiencing a severe new wave of Covid-19 that has led oxygen prices to jump and the Red Cross to warn of a looming catastrophe.
At the end of 2020, Thailand introduced golf quarantines and long-stay visas to restart international tourism, but a second wave quickly shut down that effort. Now it can wait no longer. From tomorrow (July 1), the Thai beach destination of Phuket will begin welcoming vaccinated tourists for quarantine-free holidays, even as the country continues to battle a third wave of Covid-19.
On Thursday morning, hundreds of police officers descended on the newsroom of Hong Kong pro-democracy publisher Apple Daily. It was the second raid on the publication in less than a year.
It happens time and time again.
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With many countries across Asia experiencing rises in Covid-19 cases, Davos-in-Singapore is off—the World Economic Forum canceled its special summer event there as the southeast Asian city-state grapples with a new Covid-19 outbreak. And Taiwan has lost its nearly Covid-free status and instead appears to be heading for its first lockdown of the pandemic.
Davos was the first—and the last—big, in-person, international event to take place in 2020. Many of the 3,000 delegates who gathered at the end of January in the town nestled in the Swiss Alps were unaware that a global pandemic was looming.
On Dec. 1, 2020, as approval of the first Covid-19 vaccines appeared imminent, a hopeful question popped up on TripAdvisor’s Japan travel forum.
A top Japanese official muttered darkly last year about an Olympics “curse,” as it became ever clearer that the host of the Summer Olympics would have to postpone the 2020 games to this year. Now, with Tokyo’s rising coronavirus infection numbers pushing it into a new state of emergency, and public support staunchly against holding the games, it’s reasonable to wonder if they will actually take place even in 2021.
Lunar New Year is usually a popular time for dining out as families spread out all over China get together to celebrate. But on the eve of the holiday last year, panic was setting in about a new coronavirus. China instituted strict lockdowns, sending restaurant sales cratering 41% in January and February.
The inoculation of a 90-year-old British woman on Tuesday marked the start of the UK’s first mass Covid-19 vaccine campaign, and will likely be followed by widespread vaccination globally in the coming months.
After World War II, the US and UK backed the precursor framework to the World Trade Organization, hoping to move the world firmly away from the ill effects of 1920s and 1930s protectionism, and believing that the geopolitical gains would be as great as the economic ones.
It’s not normal for a brand-new airliner to fall out of the sky. But that’s what happened on Oct. 28, 2018, when a Lion Air flight using the 737 Max plane plunged into the sea less than 15 minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing 189 people. And then it happened again just five months later.
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With the Philippines arresting journalist Maria Ressa multiple times since 2018 on charges ranging from tax evasion to cyber libel, it was only a matter of time until authorities secured a conviction. They worked quite hard to get there.
Li Wenliang, the doctor who initially warned the medical community about a cluster of severe pneumonia cases in December and was reprimanded by Wuhan authorities for that warning, has himself died of the coronavirus.
