With newspapers full of stories about the challenges migrant families face, it might be tempting to assume that the causes of displacement are also being addressed.

What was at first a trade skirmish—with US President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum—appears to be quickly morphing into a full-scale trade war with China.

One of the more ambitious targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the commitment to end preventable deaths of newborns and children over the next decade. If this target is met, by 2030 no country will have a neonatal mortality rate above 12 deaths per 1,000 births—a quarter of the current rate in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This week, South Africa is hosting the tenth annual gathering of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). When the first BRIC summit was held in 2009 (South Africa was added in 2010), the world was in the throes of a financial crisis of the developed world's making, and the increasingly dynamic BRIC bloc represented the future.

What is left of NATO and the transatlantic order after US President Donald Trump's tumultuous week in Brussels, the United Kingdom, and Helsinki, where he defended Russian President Vladimir Putin against accusations of cyber warfare by America's own intelligence agencies?

In the last few years, for many people and their leaders, globalisation has become a scourge to be purged in favour of greater protectionism and unilateralism.

Immigration-related headlines have become a staple in Europe, whether the story is of an illegal Malian immigrant scaling a Paris building to rescue a toddler or the formation of a populist government in Italy that aims to deport a half-million migrants.

In the beginning, British Prime Minister Theresa May had a plan: “Brexit means Brexit.” The idea was to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union so fast that voters would not realise they had been sold a bill of goods during the EU referendum campaign and should therefore not punish the Conservative Party for having lied to them.

As the World Cup unfolds, captivating soccer fans around the globe, the broad appeal of high-level sports is on full display.

President Vladimir Putin worked hard to bring the 2018 FIFA World Cup to Russia, but now that the spectacle is underway, his influence has waned.

Europe's established left is facing the threat of extinction. In less than two years, the continent's social-democratic parties have suffered historic losses in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. On a continent long defined by democratic competition between centre-right and centre-left parties, the collapse of the left could have far-reaching consequences, beyond particular party interests.

As officials from the United States and North Korea prepare for the June 12 summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, nuclear experts must come to terms with a significant question: If Kim commits to dismantling his nuclear stockpile, how can the world be sure that he is following through?

My family was murdered before I could tie my shoes. As a young boy in Sierra Leone, years that should have been playful and carefree were spent fighting in someone else's war.

There can no longer be any doubt that “America First” means precisely that. In abandoning the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, US President Donald Trump rejected the advice of allies and showed an utter disregard for the interests of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the broader international community.

In India's Karnataka state, the governor is favouring the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form a government, despite an opposition coalition having won more seats in the state legislature.

From the Brexit vote to Donald Trump's election as US president to rising support for populist parties in countries like Germany and Italy, much of the electoral upheaval in Western democracies in recent years has been attributed at least partly to a backlash against globalisation. But globalisation does not deserve voters' ire.

When Facebook went public in May 2012, its capacity for effective corporate governance was already in doubt. Fast-forward six years, and Facebook has accumulated massive power, access, and influence—and, in many ways, proved the doubters right.

FOR four decades, the garment industry has powered Bangladesh's economy and put more people to work than any other sector. Women in particular have benefited from this hiring boom, and today, a majority of the industry's four million employees are female.

This week, a senior German official pointed out to me that, “The Iran nuclear deal is the last firewall preventing military tensions in the world's most combustible region from spilling over into thermonuclear war.” That language is unusually apocalyptic, but it reflects a genuine fear that US President Donald Trump could soon dismantle a crucial line of defence that Germans and other Europeans are proud to have built.

Bangladesh has become one of Asia's most remarkable and unexpected success stories in recent years. Once one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh remained an economic basket case—wracked by poverty and famine—for many years after independence in 1971. In fact, by 2006, conditions seemed so hopeless that when Bangladesh registered faster growth than Pakistan, it was dismissed as a fluke.