Piers Morgan has provoked public spats with body-positive models, millennial snowflakes and countless celebrities. Photo / Getty Images
Piers Morgan has provoked public spats with body-positive models, millennial snowflakes and countless celebrities. Photo / Getty Images
Welcome to the weekend, the first one post-lockdown!
People around the country will no doubt have plans to get back to their favourite restaurant, catch up with friends and family, or get back into those outdoor activities that had been restricted during lockdown.
Whatever your plans are make sure youmake some time to catch up on some of the best pieces from our premium international syndicators this week.
Happy reading.
Piers Morgan turns on Trump: 'You can't bullshit your way through a death toll'
Piers Morgan has provoked many public and unedifying spats. His list of bêtes noires is so long and ludicrous, people tend to assume he makes half of it up, but he has always sworn he means every rant sincerely. The jewel in the arch-controversialist's crown though is his friendship with President Trump.
In the upside-down world of the coronavirus crisis, however, Morgan has emerged as something approaching a national hero in his efforts to speak truth to obfuscating power.
He's also turned on Trump.
So how would he feel if Trump unfollowed him on Twitter?.
Piers Morgan with Donald Trump in 2010. Morgan has said he doesn't think Trump should be re-elected. Photo / Getty Images
A 'very, very messy' process: How pandemics end
When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?
According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.
People wait in line to shop at the Mega store downtown in Munich. Germany has been lifting coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Photo / AP
What happens if we get a vaccine and people won't take it?
All the misinformation we've seen so far during the Covid-19 pandemic - the false rumours that 5G cellphone towers fuel the coronavirus, that drinking bleach or injecting UV rays can cure it, that Dr Anthony Fauci is part of an anti-Trump conspiracy — may be just the warm-up act for a much bigger information war when an effective vaccine becomes available to the public.
This war could pit public health officials and politicians against an anti-vaccination movement that floods social media with misinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda aimed at convincing people that the vaccine is a menace rather than a lifesaving, economy-rescuing miracle.
The anti-vaccine community is more organised and strategic than many of its critics believe. Photo / 123RF
Jerry Seinfeld is making peace with nothing: I'm 'post-show business'
Many of us have been wondering lately what Jerry Seinfeld, the sitcom character, would be doing in this current era of home quarantines and social distancing: how his extreme fastidiousness, self-centredness and constant scrutiny of quotidian details (not to mention the hyperbolic traits of his fictional friends and neighbours) would be stretched to hilarious extremes in an environment of isolation and anxiety.
However, the real Jerry Seinfeld — the one who gave up the sitcom long ago to focus on an occasional talk show and a peerless stand-up career — is not the same guy.
Jerry Seinfeld, photographed via FaceTime, by Daniel Arnold in the photographer's home. Photo / Daniel Arnold, New York Times
Why the coming emerging markets debt crisis will be messy
Zambia, Ecuador and Rwanda have all announced in recent weeks that they are struggling to repay their debts. Lebanon has already kicked off its restructuring process, while Argentina, which was battling its creditors even before the pandemic struck, appears to be heading for its ninth sovereign default since independence in 1816. Investors believe many other developing countries are not too far behind.
A man wearing a mask for coronavirus walks by side a graffiti in Quito, Ecuador. The country says it may have trouble repaying its debts. Photo / AP
Big tech has crushed the news business. That's about to change
It reads like a coroner's report on the news business, 623 pages filled with charts and graphs detailing the devastating decline in local news and public policy reporting of the past decade. It landed on the Australian prime minister's desk last summer, unnoticed by most news consumers in America and around the world.
But the report by Australian regulators left little doubt about what they see as the cause of local journalism's demise — the near monopolistic power of Google and Facebook. And it has set off a chain of events that could shift the balance of power between big tech and the news at a dire moment for journalism.
Rod Sims, an Australian regulator, says the big tech platforms have created "a significant market failure which harms journalism and so, society." Photo / AP
Covid-19 crisis: Does value investing still make sense?
Value investing has gone through several bouts of existential angst over the past century, and always comes back strongly. But its poor performance during the coronavirus crisis has only added to the crisis of confidence. The strength and length of the recent woes raises some thorny questions. Why has value lost its mojo and is it gone forever?
Born into carnage, 18 Afghan babies face an uncertain fate
When the carnage was over, the dead bodies bagged and the guns put away, what was left behind spoke of the true extent of the tragedy: 18 newborn babies, many covered in blood and most now motherless — casualties of war before they had even left the hospital.
Even for a country steeped in violent death to the point of numbness,the assault on a maternity clinic in Kabul on Tuesday was unfathomable in its cruelty.
But what do you do with so many babies, all too similar in their little shapes and raw faces, most of them now without the first people in their lives and evacuated from a blown-up hospital?
The day after: These newborns were rescued during an attack on a maternity clinic in Kabul. Photo / Jim Huylebroek, The New York Times
Quarantining with a ghost? It's scary
For those whose experience of self-isolation involves what they believe to be a ghost, their days are punctuated not just by Zoom meetings or home schooling but by disembodied voices, shadowy figures, misbehaving electronics, invisible cats cozying up on couches, caresses from hands that aren't there and even, in some cases — to borrow the technical parlance of Ghostbusters — free-floating, full-torso vaporous apparitions.
Some of these people are frightened, of course. Others say they just appreciate the company.
Some people believe they have been stuck in lockdown with ghosts. Photo / Getty Images
Latin America's outbreaks rival Europe's. But its options are worse
Deaths doubled in Lima, rivalling the worst month of the pandemic in Paris. They tripled in Manaus, a metropolis tucked deep in Brazil's Amazon — a surge similar to what London and Madrid endured.
In Guayaquil, a port city in Ecuador, the sudden spike in fatalities in April was comparable to what New York City experienced during its worst month: more than five times the number of people died than in previous years.
An analysis by The New York Times found some cities in Latin America have seen increases in death matching the worst of the pandemic anywhere else.
Graves at the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo / Victor Moriyama, The New York Times
China is defensive. The US is absent. Can the rest of the world fill the void?
Confronting a once-in-a-generation crisis, the world's middle powers are urgently trying to revive the old norms of can-do multilateralism.
Countries in Europe and Asia are forging new bonds on issues like public health and trade, planning for a future built on what they see as the pandemic's biggest lessons: that the risks of China's authoritarian government can no longer be denied, and that the United States cannot be relied on to lead when it's struggling to keep people alive and working, and its foreign policy is increasingly "America first."
