 1 May, 2021 India  Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images Overwhelmed by a Covid catastrophe "It feels like the end times in New Delhi," says Mandakini Gahlot in Foreign Affairs. As a second wave of Covid-19 crashes over the Indian capital and beyond, an "unbelievable tragedy" is unfolding. Queues of desperate patients and their families are overwhelming hospitals, which are running out of oxygen. There are lines of corpses outside crematoria, where the grilles in the overworked ovens are melting. Yesterday, 3,645 Covid deaths and 379,257 cases were reported across the country, and experts fear as many as a million cases a day by the middle of May. It's the nightmare scenario, "the disease rampant and devastation at an unimaginable scale". And because the government failed to prepare for this catastrophe, "the Indian people are being cheated at every step", says Akash Goel in The Spectator. Patients unable to get into hospital are being forced to buy the medicine remdesivir on the black market for as much as £670 a vial. Oxygen cylinders are being sold half-full by "crook suppliers who take the money and disappear". It's terrible for everyone, but the pandemic "has rigged all aspects of the system against those with the least means". Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stares into the headlights "like a transfixed animal, unable to move", says Vijay Prashad in Asia Times. During the haphazard lockdown he imposed last year, he "urged people to light candles and bang pots, to make noise to scare away the virus". Now there have been 18 million official cases and more than 208,000 confirmed dead in the pandemic. And this in a country that prides itself as "the world's pharmacy". The situation has been made even worse by Modi's "diabolical" underfunding of public health – spending per head in 2018 was £198, "around the same as Sierra Leone", with only 48,000 ventilators for a population of 1.36 billion. What we're living through here in India is "an outright crime against humanity", and Modi's government is to blame, says author Arundhati Roy in The Guardian. But it refuses to take responsibility – on the very day last week that 20 patients died in a Delhi hospital due to an oxygen shortage, the country's solicitor general said: "Let's try and not be a cry baby... no one in the country was left without oxygen." The system hasn't collapsed, it "barely existed". As a result we have little idea of the extent of the tragedy – the death toll could be "up to 30 times higher than the official count". We speak to those we love in tears, not knowing if we will ever see each other again or what horror lies ahead. "That is what breaks us." The big picture The world must pay attention to India's plight, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Western countries tend to "compete to see who can deal with the virus better" which will get us nowhere – "this is an interconnected global crisis". Helping India is a humanitarian necessity and, if America wants India's help in its rivalry with China, a "geopolitical necessity". The lesson, for the UK in particular, is to guard against premature celebration of the virus's defeat. India will "certainly not be the last country to witness a tragic resurgence of Covid-19".
Long read shortened  Akindo/Getty Images Kim's crack force of cyber thieves North Koreans are among the best hackers in the world, says Ed Caesar in The New Yorker. Given that only a "tiny fraction" of them have internet access, that's remarkable. One security expert tells me Pyongyang has recently stolen at least $1.75bn in bitcoin – that would cover 10% of Kim Jong-un's defence budget. North Korean mathematics prodigies are handpicked at a young age for specialised high schools, then taught coding at Kim Chaek University of Technology or Kim Il-sung University. The best teenagers are allowed to compete in overseas events such as the International Mathematical Olympiad – it's good practice against foreign adversaries. (North Korea is the only country to have been disqualified for suspected cheating.) Then they're housed in Pyongyang, cut off from friends, but with cars, comfortable houses and other material benefits "known as Kim Jong-un's special gifts". People remember the "cartoonish" Sony hack in 2014, but North Korea's flashy "bank heists" are equally worthy of a film script. The Sony gang made off with millions by installing a "backdoor" in Bangladesh Bank's computer systems in 2015. "It was the equivalent of breaking into a bank's vault after disabling its surveillance cameras." Some are "saddened to think of brilliant young North Korean minds being wasted in schemes to rob banks and install ransomware". Ri Jong-yol, now 23, fled the 2016 maths Olympiad in Hong Kong and defected. North Korea now sends a government agent with its "mathletes" to ensure this never happens again. Read the full article here.
Zeitgeist Cancel culture could do for Dickens This week marks a "sea change" in publishers' reactions to their authors' behaviour, says Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Staffers at Simon & Schuster petitioned bosses to drop a forthcoming book by Mike Pence for "complicity in perpetuating white supremacy" and "rehabilitating fascists". At the same time, Norton permanently cancelled a brand-new biography of Philip Roth after its author, Blake Bailey, was accused of "inappropriate" sexual behaviour. Any unsold copies are being pulped, and he has been dropped by his literary agents. In the space of a few days, says DJ Taylor in The Times, "one of America's most distinguished literary biographers has become a non-person". The extraordinary implication is that any writer, living or dead, can be pulled from the shelves "simply for bad behaviour". What of William Thackeray, sipper of mint juleps on slave plantations in the antebellum South? Or Dickens, whose mistreatment of his wife was a "mid-Victorian byword"? Must we now expunge Vanity Fair and Bleak House? A teenage George Orwell is "reliably reported" to have sexually assaulted a girl named Jacintha Buddicom. Surely this means tearing up Animal Farm and sending in the censors for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Staying young "There's a name for the blah you're feeling: it's called languishing," says Adam Grant in The New York Times. Languishing is the "neglected middle child of mental health", the void between depression and flourishing. It is a sense of stagnation and aimlessness, as if you're "looking at your life through a foggy windshield". It may well be the "dominant emotion of 2021". Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your focus and shortens the odds that you'll cut back on work. What's more, those who are languishing today are most likely to experience depression and anxiety in the next 10 years. The danger is that "when you can't see your own suffering, you don't seek help". Now for the good news: "One of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them." Acknowledging the feeling of languishing is the first step toward treating it.
Property  THE HIDEAWAY With 120 acres of vineyards, 17th-century Château de Mazelières is an oenophile's dream, says Country Life. Near the pretty town of Nérac, in southwest France, the 17th-century home has eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, cosy family rooms and large entertaining spaces – there's a spectacular vaulted ceiling in the dining room. Bergerac and Toulouse airports are both a 90-minute drive. £2.57m.
Books Just how close, asks Roger Alton in the Daily Mail, did America and the Soviet Union come to nuclear war in October 1962? "Too damn close," says Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy in Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allen Lane £25). The crisis that "made the world hold its breath" came during a 13-day standoff after the US discovered that the Russians had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Plokhy "thrillingly pieces together events that have stayed out of sight for too long". With access to a "treasure trove" of Soviet archive material, his book reads "like an hour-by-hour drama, history in the moment, brought vividly to life". In "startling" detail, he recounts the experience of the 43,000 Russian servicemen sent to Cuba. Battened down throughout the long journey, they arrived to find that Cuba was unbearably hot, their tins of food were rotten and the palm groves were not tall enough to conceal the secret missiles. This is probably as authoritative a version of the Soviet side as we are likely to get, says Max Hastings in The Sunday Times. Neither John F Kennedy nor Nikita Krushchev had "as much control of events as they wished to suppose". Both sides suffered "huge intelligence failures" and the Americans "failed to understand that the nuclear weapons were already armed and operational". The book will be gladly plundered by students and scholars, says Julie McDowall in The Times, "and highlighted until its pages are damp with neon yellow". The Cold War might be over, but "the nuclear monsters have not gone away. It is good to be afraid." Available as an audiobook on Audible.
Quoted "I heard them rowing again this morning, look you. I had just completed my first dump of the day in Allegra Stratton's handbag when I heard their voices spiralling upwards, the Man and the Woman... Carrie, who purchased me under the mistaken impression I was a peke who would lie gently across her bloody lap all day. And that shambling albino wreck, kind of half-dog half-man, who apparently runs the country, when his wife lets him..." Dilyn the dog, as told to The Spectator's Rod Liddle That's it. You're done. Been forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to receive it every day. Download our app in the App Store The Knowledge is now live on Instagram. Click the icon to follow us
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May 01, 2021
Overwhelmed by a Covid catastrophe
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