As contact-tracing apps prove less useful than hoped in many countries, other digital tools such as wearable fitness trackers are gaining in popularity for detecting or tracing coronavirus infection. But a reliance on such technologies comes with big questions about effectiveness and privacy.

South Korea has put forth a “Green New Deal”, whose ambiguous targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and failure to propose a just transition to clean energy make the program unworthy of its name.

Conspiracy theories might seem funny in ordinary times. But against the backdrop of escalating far-right attacks worldwide in recent years and now the pandemic, these myths have spiraled into a dangerous pattern of radicalization.

In Asia, the pandemic has accelerated efforts to keep citizens informed through prompt and extensive data sharing. However, this new openness has also led to concerns regarding transparency, data protection, and democratic participation.

This should have been a summer like no other for Tokyo. After 56 years, the Games of the XXXII Olympiad and the Paralympic Games should have returned to the city to bolster former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s grand project to revitalize Japan. Like in 1964 – when Tokyo, as the first Asian city to host the Olympics, sought to demonstrate to the world that it had emerged from the post-war period and transformed into a strong, liberal democracy – the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were meant to show the nation and the world that ‘Japan is back’ and that the 2011 Fukushima triple catastrophe was a thing of the past.