IN ASIA

Parents of locked-down children are more worried than ever about screen time. But preparing children for the future won’t happen by looking backwards to a pre-screen world that has already come and gone.m Today’s kids need screen-time mentors, not screen-time monitors

If humanity can put our economies on hold to fight a global threat like Covid-19, why haven’t we been able to take similar measures to confront a global killer like climate change?

Some of the most indelible images of the pandemic have been the brilliant skies that replaced toxic smog as the world stayed home and fossil-fuel use plunged. With renewables now cheaper than coal, green energy’s time has come.

Across Nepal, the coronavirus pandemic is confronting cities and towns with a defining challenge to that nation’s nascent federal system, as young local governments struggle to meet their constitutional public-health mandate.

“Before the pandemic took over our lives, we all sometimes wished we could simply work from home,” writes the author. “So why do 85 percent of my colleagues want to come back to the office as soon as possible?”

A two-decade push by Bangladesh to reform its leather tanning industry was supposed to clean up pollution and end worker exploitation. So far, it hasn’t quite worked out as planned.

How has a country of 96 million that can barely get its citizens to obey the traffic laws managed the Covid-19 pandemic with less than 300 cases and no deaths?

A mobile app lets residents of Ulaanbaatar vote for their priorities for new infrastructure projects. The latest round of voting shows that Mongolia may be a good fit for digital democracy.

When Luce Scholar Davis Butner fled Shanghai ahead Covid-19 travel restrictions, he took only his dufflebag and a set of indelible impressions of a city he calls “a boiling hotpot of overlapping daily routines and paradoxical interactions.” 

A new survey by The Asia Foundation and the World Health Organization provides a wealth of much-needed new data, and some startling results.