Guardian Weekly cover 22 January 2021 Photograph: GNM/Scott Olson/Getty
Wed 20 Jan 2021 07.00 EST
Last modified on Fri 2 Apr 2021 10.46 EDT
Welcome to the first edition of the post-Trump era. Itâs certainly going to be ⦠different. This week, as Joe Biden moves to restore normality to the US presidency, Fintan OâToole looks at the 46th presidentâs life and wonders if it is Bidenâs private persona â one shadowed by loss â that will help to restore his country. We also look at the moves Bidenâs team has committed to making in the administrationâs early days. To say farewell to the outgoing president â who last week became the first to be impeached twice â Richard Wolffe looks at the ragged state of the Republican party. The GOP has been pronounced dead before and always fought its way back. But could the pro/anti Trump rupture in the party prove fatal?
India Has Gained Two Vaccines but Its Regulators Have Tarnished Indian Science 06/01/2021
Photo: manicomi/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
In mid-December 2020, when British foreign secretary Dominic Raab visited India, he made it a point to highlight India’s vital role in the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. India, he noted, supplied more than 50% of the world’s vaccines, and 25% of the generic drugs used in the UK’s £120-billion-a-year National Health Service.
A week, it is said, is a long time in politics, and in the fortnight since that visit, much has happened. The British prime minister’s visit to India, that Raab was preparing the ground for, stands cancelled, and a media storm has swirled around the hasty and allegedly premature approval by Indian regulators of the vaccine candidates developed by two of India’s leading bio-pharma manufacturers: the Serum Institute in Pune and Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad.
Pakistan’s ‘disappeared’ suffer kidnap, torture, murder
Despite promises while a member of the opposition to end enforced abduction by security forces, numbers have increased under Imran Khan’s government
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shah Meer Baloch / The Guardian, QUETTA, Pakistan
The abductors moved with an ease and stealth that suggested they had done this before. As Qayyum (his name has been changed to protect his identity) and his family slept, 12 masked and uniformed soldiers used a ladder to scale the gate of the house, in an affluent neighborhood of the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan.
The family woke as they burst in, but the officers silenced them with an order: Don’t scream or we will beat you. One demanded Qayyum’s national identity card.