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The term soft power (and its siblings hard power and smart power), employed to embrace a particular category of resources of potential power, originated in the stable of Joseph S Nye, Jr, a Harvard University distinguished service professor and former senior member of the US military-intelligence complex.

What is the value of sustaining international peace in the age of new technologies with incredible disruptive potential, such as the combination of weapons and artificial intelligence (AI)?

I am a keen gardener, and during the Covid-19 lockdown I had the great good fortune to be allowed by our neighbour, Janet, to take over the care of her very large, tree-lined, and blissfully quiet garden. The weather was also unusually good, so I spent on average six hours a day working in it through late March, April, and May. I could have wished for nothing more.

Answer: The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. Why?

The UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, presented on 11 June, comes at the time when the world is trying to grasp the tectonic economic, political, and social shifts triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Digitalisation is the nexus of these shifts as digital tools shape the future of work, learning, trade, and our society in general. 

On 2 July 2020 I received an e-mail from Razvan Constantinescu, the energetic Romanian honorary-consul general for the south-west of England based in Bristol and president of the Bristol Consular Corps. This told me how the COVID-19 pandemic first revolutionised the nature of his workload, and then reduced it to a ‘walk in the park’.

‘Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.’

― Greg Tate (US writer, musician, and founding member of the Black Rock Coalition)

When the abuse of diplomatic immunity is alleged to have occurred, it usually refers to diplomatic officers taking advantage of their special status under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) to avoid penalties for misdemeanours, such as ignoring parking regulations, shoplifting, and so on; occasionally for more serious offences.

Transportation as the growth engine of the economy has been one of the industries that has been hit the hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has substantially impacted how we work, how we travel, and how we use technology. It has put an incredible strain on global supply chains, from medical supplies to household goods, as spikes in demand stress-test logistics infrastructures. 

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, South East Asia has become a particularly affected region, numbering, by 2 June 2020, more than 90 000 COVID-19 cases and 2000 deaths.