Lebanese elites flee as banks come under attack

A flurry of business jets departed from Beirut airport overnight as Lebanese with means fled a fierce new round of public anger directed against the country’s financial sector. A night of unrest, which pitted demonstrators against the Lebanese armed forces, left one protester dead in the northern city of Tripoli, unleashing a new wave of anger in the streets by Tuesday. Lebanon’s national currency, spiraling against the dollar for months, is now in free fall. Read More

Virus vaccine could be ready by September

A vaccine to combat the Covid-19 pandemic could be rolled out as early as September. In the race to find a coronavirus cure, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom appears to have edged ahead of three Chinese consortiums. Last week, the UK government announced that a further £20 million, or US$24.7 million, would be injected into the project. Read More

Why the US withdrew its bombers from Guam

In one awkward and still unexplained step, the Pentagon is unnerving allies and friends while potentially harming the US forward deterrent in the Pacific, especially as it applies to China. The unexplained step was the mid-April withdrawal of strategic bombers from Guam. While Guam is far from the troubled Taiwan Straits, Okinawa and Japan, it is light years closer than flying combat aircraft from the middle of the US. Read More

Time may be ripe for China to invade Taiwan

Has the Covid-19 pandemic created the strategic conditions for a US-China clash over Taiwan? China has recently provocatively deployed fighter jets and nuclear-capable bombers near the self-governing island Beijing considers a renegade province that must be reincorporated to the mainland. Read More

Tankers thrive while oil tanks in Singapore

Dozens of oil supertankers have dropped anchor off the coast of Singapore with no clear timetable for when they may offload millions of barrels of unwanted oil they have been chartered to carry. The Asian oil-trading hub’s onshore storage facilities are at capacity, leaving tankers of varying sizes crowding the seas to serve as floating storage vessels. Read More

How to think post-Planet Lockdown

Between unaccountability of elites and total fragmentation of civil society, Covid-19 as a circuit breaker is showing how the king – systemic design – is naked. We are being sucked into a danse macabre of multiple complex systems “colliding into one another,” producing all kinds of mostly negative feedback loops. Read More

Virus apocalypse puts small businesses in ICU

Man is living through an unprecedented crisis. Never before in living memory has the world been so shaken by a pandemic. Never before have so many economies been shut down. Amid this, the businesses most at risk are small, cash-flow dependent firms. Three self-employed members of the global middle classes, all with Asia connections, told Asia Times of their current situations and confided their fears for the future. Read More

From the archives

Why Beijing must change before it’s too late: From the US perspective, it’s all China’s fault. Could the virus in America be the Pearl Harbor of the next conflict?

China could soon sink US in South China Sea: The recent US deployment to contested waterway likely has Chinese strategic planners thinking: 'So that's all you've got?'

Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan: The US-funded $3.7 million project was approved by Trump's Covid-19 guru Dr Anthony Fauci in 2015 after US ban imposed on 'monster-germ' research.

What Asia Times staff are reading

The Future of Korean Politics Might Be This Defector From Pyongyang: Thae Yong-ho went from North Korean diplomat to South Korean politician.

Navigating the US-China 5G competition: The race is on to deploy fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks, and the country that dominates will lead in standard-setting, patents, and the global supply chain.

China lab rejects COVID-19 conspiracy claims, but virus origins still a mystery: Conspiracy theorists have claimed SARS-CoV-2 was synthesized by the Wuhan Institute of Virology