From  Worldometer , COVID-19 cases this past week (in parentheses, cases in the last 7 days/million population): World  3,626,189 (453) #1  Japan  1,029,587 (8198) #2  S. Korea  455,268 (8869) #3  France  396,007 (6038) #4  Brazil  299,204 (1389) #5  USA  294,280 (879) #6  Germany  221,956 (2646) #7  Italy  130,145 2160) #8  Taiwan  106,827 (4472) #9  Hong Kong  206,806 (14,045) #10  Australia  103,147 (3957) I can generalize in various ways.   Sure, China did start the pandemic, but the two epicenters quickly became Europe and USA.   Countries of the Orient and Oceania fared well for the first two years. Today, the leading COVID centers are Europe, the USA, the Orient and Oceania. Early on, pundits remarked that countries like Japan did not get badly infected because they wore masks and culture provided a higher responsibility factor, plus, perhaps, some variati...

Before getting into nostalgia, who is  new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ? 42-year old Hindu born in Southampton whose parents of Indian descent migrated from East Africa in the 1960s. Went to Oxford, then got an MBA from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar. While at Stanford, met his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of Indian billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy, who founded Infosys. Rishi and Akshata have two children and are an almost billionaire couple, the 222nd richest people in Britain. First British Asian and Hindu to become prime minister. While relatively young, David Cameron in 2010 was only a year older at 43, while the first PM, Robert Walpole in 1721 was 44, William Cavendish in 1756 was 36, Charles Watson-Wentworth was 35, Augustus FitzRoy in 1768 was 33 and William Pitt the Younger ( right ) in 1783 was 24.  Winston Churchill in 1940 was 65, Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was 53 and Tony Blair in 1997 was 43. According to  Time  magazine: He bears none of ...