A survey of articles published in the English-speaking world

Suggested Reading for 2020

From the page on world news of the history pages

(The article of the month is highlighted with >>>)

2001-2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

December 2020:

China plans dam on Brahmaputra (Times of India)
Did Putin buy Trump? (San Francisco Chronicle)
Trade deal between Europe and China, bypassing the USA (New York Times)
The biggest cyber-attack in history (New York Times)
Covid-19 in China's media (BBC)
Victims of the "Havana syndrome" were silenced by the Trump administration (GQ)
Results of the investigation into the 2016 microwave attacks against US personnel in Cuba and other countries (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine)
Purges in the Ministry of Public Security under the Xi Jinping leadership (PRCleader)

November 2020:

October 2020:

Amy Coney Barrett doesn't know US election laws (Atlantic)
>>>The Swedish approach to covid (Time)
The SPARC fusion reactor at MIT (MIT News)
Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic (BBC News)

September 2020:

Ken Rogoff on China's real estate (Vox China)
Turkey cracks down on doctors who dispute Turkey's official covid figures (British Medical Journal)
The Australian-Chinese Cold War (Reuters)
>>>The world thinks that China did a much better job at containing covid than the USA (Pew Center)
Large numbers of new detention camps for Muslims uncovered in China's Xinjiang (Australian Strategic Policy Institute)
Climate Change has been "successfully transformed into the world's largest secular religion" (John O'Sullivan)
"How Discrimination Increases Chinese Overseas Students' Support for Authoritarian Rule" (Stanford paper)
Interview with Peter Strzok on the Trump-Russia collusion (Atlantic)
Interview with Jason Stanley on fascism and Trump (NPR)

August 2020:

>>>Josep Borrell on China (Yahoo)
How China Controlled the Coronavirus (New Yorker)
The mysterious case of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui (Politico)

July 2020:

China launches new amphibious assault ships (Reuters)
China's AI-based Panopticon (Atlantic)
Inside the Iraqi Kleptocracy (New York Times)
The Iran-China Deal (TRT World)
>>> Why the USA is Afraid of Tiktok (Atlantic)

June 2020:

Fake news in China (BBC News)
Twitter deletes accounts of Chinese dissidents (Taiwan News)
The US tax system encourages automation (Brookings)
>>> Chinese-educated researchers contribute to almost one-third of the papers accepted and promoted at main A.I. conferences and most of them live in the USA (MacroPolo)
Chinese-born scientists dominate A.I. research in the USA (New York Times)

May 2020:

How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease (Propublica)
Pakistan still supports the Taliban (US Defense Dept)
US drone wars around the world (Foreign Policy)
Will the coronavirus help mRNA and DNA vaccines prove their worth? (C&En)
Adenoviral vectors are the new COVID-19 vaccine front-runners (C&En)
Coronavirus conspiracy theories (Yahoo)
60% of the British public believe that their government is lying about the origin of the virus; 40% believe that the spread of the virus is likely a plan by powerful people to gain control; and 20% believe that the virus is likely a hoax. (Oxford Univ)
The Q cult on the Internet
The race to solve coronavirus protein structures (Nature)
How Florida covered up the real covid-19 death toll (ClickOrlando)
Yanzhong Huang on the early response by China (Vox)
Wuhan: The Beginning (BBC documentary)
What really happened to flight MH370 (The Atlantic)
The Dominance of the U.S. Dollar During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Foreign Policy Research Institute)
The Secret to Vietnam's COVID-19 Response Success (Diplomat)
Zero covid-19 deaths in Vietnam (NPR)

April 2020:

Science Shows Chinese Dams Are Devastating the Mekong (Foreign Policy)
A Translation of Tsinghua professor Zhongyun Zi's essay "Still Suckled on Wolf's Milk" (former head of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing) (China Heritage)
How the Coronavirus Mutates and Spreads (New York Times)
How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? (New York Times).
Why Zoom Is Terrible (New York Times)
Marc Andreessen's post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic (A16z)
A.I. is an ideology, not a technology (Jaron Lanier in Wired)
The coronavirus didn't break America, it revealed what was already broken (The Atlantic)
The coronavirus is mutating much faster than we knew and mutations affect its deadliness (Zhejiang University)
SquirrelAI pioneers a revolution in teaching in the classroom (MIT Tech Review)
>>> A study shows that covid-19 infections and deaths in different regions are proportional to how many viewers watch Sean Hannity's show on Fox News (University of Chicago)
Germany's covid-19 strategy (Business Insider)
The story of the biggest cluster in the Midwest (BBC News)
Rushing to develop a vaccine could cause a health catastrophe (Wired)
Russia tests space weapons (US Space Force)
Yet another summary of the search for a covid-19 vaccine (Live Science)
A Harvard simulation shows that prolonged or intermittent periods of social distancing may be required through 2022 (Harvard)
The USA's plan to reopen in phases (White House)
Alexander Veysov's criticism of speech recognition A.I. (The Gradient)
Anthony Fauci admits that lives could have been saved if Trump had listened to the experts (Yahoo News)
Bill Gates' plan to fight covid-19 in the USA (Washington Post)
Covid deaths by state in the USA (Statista)
Why the USA ran out of face masks (Atlantic)
Bill Gates' opinion on the response to the epidemic (BBC interview)
>>> The inside story of Trump's blunders on covid-19
Spring breakers were the super-spreaders of Florida
Gilead's remdesivir improves the conditions of 68% of critically-ill covid-19 patients (New England Medical Journal)
Stanford scientists develop antibody test for covid-19 (Stanford)
The Rise of Inequality in the USA (graphs) (New York Times)
Chinese blogger Ren Zhiqiang criticizes the government's response to covid-19 (China Digital Times)
Harm van Bakel's genetic study at Mount Sinai shows that New York's first covid-19 cases came from Europe and Washington state (Mount Sinai)
Adriana Heguy's genetic study at NYU finds that viral samples collected in New York patients of covid-19 originated in Europe (NYU Langone's Genome Technology Center)
Georgia governor didn't know that asymptomatic people can spread covid-19 (The Hill)
No, the virus did not originate in a lab - debunking conspiracy theories of the right and of the left (Alliance for Science)
A timeline overview of Trump's lawsuits (Ken Boyd)
Trump was warned in January of a devastating epidemic (New York Times)
Peter Navarro's memo to Trump, warning of the costs of a devastating epidemic
How Spain became the most infected country in Europe

March 2020:

An introduction to state-owned firms in China (China Journal of Accounting Research)
China distrusts the West in the race to a covid19 vaccine /A> (Global Times)
Don't rush to deploy COVID-19 vaccines and drugs without sufficient safety guarantees (Nature magazine)
Antimalarian drugs and covid-19 (Wired)
"National Coronavirus Response: A Road Map to Reopening" (15-page document) (American Enterprise Institute)
How government's "red tape" helped the epidemic spread in the USA
Interview with the director-general of China's CDC (George Gao) (Science magazine)
China's conspiracy theories on the origin of covid-19 (Foreign Policy)
The USA's conspiracy theories on the origin of covid-19 (Vox)
Investigating the real death toll in Wuhan (Time)
Investigating the real death toll in Wuhan (National Post)
Investigating the real death toll in Wuhan (Business Insider)
Investigating the real death toll in Wuhan (South China Morning Post)
Investigating the real death toll in Wuhan (Radio Free Asia)
"Viral Disruption - The Pandemic That's Rewriting the Global Order", podcast with with Ian Bremmer, Bill Bishop and Simon Rabinovitch (The Little Red Podcast)
The USA in the time of covid-19 (BBC)
Republican voters are skeptic about covid-19 (and nine in 10 are confident in the government's ability to handle Outbreak) (Gallup)
Covid-19 testing around the world (Note: China's data are not available)
Covid-19 data about the USA by state
Fear of China made Taiwan a coronavirus success story (Foreign Policy)
How Korea beat the USA in testing people for covid19 . (Reuters)
Geographical distribution of covid-19 in China (Statista)
Once widely criticized, the Wuhan quarantine bought the world time to prepare for Covid-19 (Statnews)
How Covid-19 is evolving (Nextstrain.org)
China's lockdown strategy worked (Guardian)
The story of covid19 (World Health Organization)
The causes of the covid19 epidemic in the USA (Atlantic)
A summary on developing vaccines (New Yorker)
Scientists think that a covid-19 vaccine will take at least 18 months (MIT Technology Review)
The challenges of making a vaccine for covid-19 (Wired)
A good summary of where we stand with the covid19 vaccine (Guardian)
How covid-19 evolves (Nextstrain)
How long does the covid-19 survive? (National Institute of Health)
How long does the covid-19 survive? (Journal of Hospitalization)
Taiwan has the lowest per-capita number of covid-19 infections (NBC News)
South Korea has the lowest death rate from covid-19 (BBC News)
How Shanghai dealt with covid19 (Nikkei Asia)
Trump and the coronavirus (Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center and lifelong Republican)
China's deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak (Atlantic)
COVID-19 might be a turning point for China and Globalization (Real Clear Politics)
The case for hard decoupling from China because of covid-19 (American Interest)

February 2020:

The economic impact of automation (The Gradient)
Birds are the world's best engineers (Hunter King, University of Akron in Ohio)
>>> "Social Contagion - Microbiological Class War in China" (Chuangcn)
China is the world's main manufacturer of pharmaceuticals (80% of pharmaceuticals sold in the USA are produced in China) and the largest supplier of medical devices in the USA (The Conversation)
Russia has sold more nuclear technology abroad since Putin came to power in 1999 than the USA, France, China, South Korea and Japan combined (IIASA)

January 2020:

The Obama administration wrecked Libya for a generation (Cato)
The first case in the USA of covid-19 is registered on January 19
Animal trade in China will cause more viral outbreaks (Yahoo)
"The Saudi Connection: Inside the 9/11 Case That Divided the F.B.I." - Did Saudi Arabia help the 9/11 terrorists? (New York Times)
Charles Jones' paper "The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population" (Stanford)
China's "debt-trap diplomacy" in Tanzania (Maritime Executive)
Russia stands to benefit from the US assassination of Soleimani (Center for Strategic and International Studies)
Xenobots (PNAS)

Back to year 2019