Dante’s Divine Comedy describes one level of hell (the City of Dis) as “Satan’s wretched city…full of distress and torment terrible.” He could well have been describing many modern-day metropolises.The world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, is experiencing a massive wave of urbanisation.

The drumbeat of warnings about a looming worldwide recession is growing ever louder. According to the latest Brookings-Financial Times TIGER indexes, which track the global economic recovery, growth momentum is declining in virtually all of the world’s major economies.

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the Xinjiang region at one point or another.

For the West, the year 2008 marked the beginning of a difficult period of crisis, recession, and uneven recovery. For China, 2008 was also an important turning point, but one followed by a decade of rapid progress that few could have foreseen.Of course, when the United States (US) investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis, China’s leaders were deeply worried.

Do you want to know what is happening in British politics today in the great debate about the United Kingdom’s (UK) departure from the European Union (EU)?Join the club. With Brexit possibly just weeks away, most British voters are in the dark. So are members of Parliament. So are the million people, including three of my daughters and three of my older grandchildren, who recently marched in London to protest against Brexit.

Nancy Pelosi is the highest-ranking elected female politician in the history of the United States (US). Theresa May is only the second female British prime minister. Amal Clooney is a world-renowned human-rights lawyer. Serena Williams is arguably the greatest female athlete of all time.All four are succeeding in environments where high-achieving women are the exception rather than the rule.

Once again, an attack on India by a Pakistan-based terrorist group has raised the spectre of a major confrontation on the Indian subcontinent and fuelled international pressure for Pakistan to take concrete action against the 22 United Nations (UN)-designated terrorist entities it hosts. But this time, the pressure is compounded by fury over attacks by Pakistan-based terrorists on the country’s other key neighbours, Iran and Afghanistan.

We have long known that the accumulation of plastic in the world’s landfills and oceans represents a growing environmental risk. More recently, we have come to understand that plastic poses an urgent – even deadly – threat to public health, too.

Tensions between India and Pakistan are at their highest level in decades, and many fear the nuclear-armed neighbours are on the brink of yet another war over the disputed Kashmir region. But the latest eruption is different from its predecessors.The two countries’ struggle over Kashmir began in 1947.

Five days before United States (US) President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met in Hanoi for their second summit, two former Vietnamese ministers of communications were arrested and charged with “violations related to management and use of public capital.” The two officials are alleged to have approved a state-owned telecom company’s purchase of a private television provider for over four times its estimated value, at a loss to the state of around US$307 million.Similarly,