Palmer Urquhart (chalkcolumn26)

It is a great challenge for developing countries to fight alone against COVID-19. As such, the international community should work to strengthen these core competencies accordingly.The globalized world economy has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic since early February 2020. In the midst of this global public health crisis, a prompt review of the counterinsurgencies that have occurred in different jurisdictions is helpful. This article examines the experience of Hong Kong (HKSAR), which successfully limited its number of confirmed cases to approximately 1100 until early June 2020. Considering the limited actions that the government has taken against the pandemic, we emphasize the prominent role of Hong Kong's civil society through highlighting the strong and spontaneous mobilization of its local communities originating from their experiences during the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the social unrest in 2019, as well as their doubts regarding the pandemic assessments and recommendations of the HKSAR and WHO authorities. This article suggests that the influence of civil society should not be overlooked in the context of pandemic management.This commentary amplifies the rising spate of human rights violations as laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. It notes that while governments in the region have declared restrictions on social gathering, in a bid to upend the deadly contagion, rights violations of vulnerable groups by law enforcement officials are on the increase. It argues that the underlying rationale for such flagrant abuse of power stems from the dearth of a rights-based approach to police-public relations, indifference of political actors, and a grossly inadequate public health and social care infrastructures for undervalued and powerless groups. Policy implications are laid out while suggestions are offered to social work professionals given their longstanding commitment to national security and development.COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the expertise and solutions to tackle global challenges, and has further highlighted the need for multi-directional learning and transformation in all countries towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We illustrate our argument for a global development paradigm by examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic across four themes or 'vignettes' global value chains, digitalisation, debt, and climate change. We conclude that development studies must adapt to a very different context from when the field emerged in the mid-20th century.The determination of critical facilities in supply chain networks has been attracting the interest of the Operations Research community. Critical facilities refer to structures including bridges, railways, train/metro stations, medical facilities, roads, warehouses, and power stations among others, which are vital to the functioning of the network. In this study we address a trilevel optimization problem for the protection of depots of utmost importance in a routing network against an intelligent adversary. We formulate the problem as a defender-attacker-defender game and refer to it as the trilevel r-interdiction selective multi-depot vehicle routing problem (3LRI-SMDVRP). read more The defender is the decision maker in the upper level problem (ULP) who picks u depots to protect among m existing ones. In the middle level problem (MLP), the attacker destroys r depots among the (m-u) unprotected ones to bring about the biggest disruption. Finally, in the lower level problem (LLP), the decision maker is again the defenden dealing with the defender-attacker-defender game on multi-depot routing networks.COVID-19 pandemic is a global thre