I have been busy for months on a real-life mission and have truly not been keeping up. But let's have a go.
Right now the biggest thing in the world is still SARS 2.0, the new coronavirus. It showed up first in Wuhan, at the center of central China, and became a crisis during the Lunar New Year holiday. The experience of SARS 1.0 led China to mobilize in a people's war against this new virus, and after thousands of casualties and tens of thousands of cases, quarantine and economic lockdown and other measures seemed to have suppressed its spread inside China. Meanwhile, globalization has spread it everywhere else. The worst affected countries have been Italy, with its position as a trading hub and its ageing population; South Korea, perhaps the first country outside of China where the virus began spreading internally; and Iran, where (suspiciously, in my opinion) the outbreak is centered on the religious center Qom, and has affected many in the national leadership. But there is now panic within the west that the virus will spread exponentially there, leading to travel restrictions, campaigns urging public hygiene and even keeping away from other people, cancellation of large events, and market crashes.
What is a realistic scenario for the future? It seems that the majority of people who catch the virus, get better on their own. The ones who die are mostly aged or already sick. So an unrealistic worst-case scenario, in which the virus simply ran amok, unopposed, might lead to several percent of the population dying. The realistic scenario would be something less than this, and would include the impact of the measures that prevented the worst-case scenario, such as the middle and upper classes (the ones who can afford to hide away for months) becoming even more sedentary and shut-in than they already are. Meanwhile, one should eventually expect a vaccine, and for the virus to return seasonally for a few years to come.
What other news is there? The US assassinated the commander of Iranian special forces, General Qassem Suleimani, and a leader in an allied Iraqi militia, "Abu Mahdi the engineer", via a drone attack at Baghdad airport, after a series of attacks and counterattacks between Iraqi militias and US forces still in Iraq. Iran's immediate response was to send missiles against a US base in Iraq; expecting US retaliation inside Iran, they also accidentally shot down a Ukrainian plane carrying many Iranian-Canadian passengers. Iran declared that the real response to Suleimani's martyrdom would be to finally drive the US out of the region, a struggle that would be centered on Iraq, and indeed the Iraqi parliament voted that all foreign forces must leave the country, but political divisions have prevented this from being enforced yet.
Elsewhere, Syria's last jihadis were besieged in Idlib (where Islamic State's Baghdadi had made his last stand) by Syrian and Russian forces, but supported by Turkey, which threatened to open the gates to Europe again. But this threat came just as coronavirus panic hit Europe, so this time Europe is unlikely to tolerate border insecurity and uncontrolled border crossings this time... Turkey also got involved in Libya's civil war, on the opposite side to Russia, just as in Syria; but perhaps there was nonetheless coordination, also just as in Syria.
Russia planned nationalist, conservative constitutional reforms, and deployed its hypersonic nuclear missiles, in order to maintain deterrence against America. In India's capital New Delhi, Aam Aadmi Party ('common man') hung on against the BJP, Modi welcomed Trump, and there were communal riots. In America, the impeachment of Trump fizzled out, and the race for the Democratic presidential candidacy came down to a replay of 2016, the establishment-backed Biden and the populist insurgent Sanders. Devastating bushfires hit Australia, and Boris Johnson's landside victory in UK elections guaranteed that some form of Brexit from the EU would finally occur.
