A social thinker illuminates his country’s populist divides. By Christopher Caldwell.

The closest I ever got to Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was 1,720.7 miles away — or so the Internet assures me... By Tom Engelhardt.

His mission was never racial or economic justice. It’s time we stop pretending it was. By Steven W Thrasher.

China has profited immensely from the open global trading system. But whether it remains open depends on the actions of the West’s increasingly reactive democracies. By Edward Luce.

Katy Perry featuring Skip Marley

In an apparent shift, Tokyo plans to push forward talks for activating the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement without the United States, which withdrew from the multination trade pact in January after President Donald Trump said he would instead pursue bilateral trade deals, a government source said. With the China-excluding pact, inked last year as part of an effort toward high-level trade liberalization, currently adrift after America’s exit, Japan has stepped up to take the lead...

The parasite that causes rat lungworm disease is now endemic in the southeastern United States, and it’s expected to spread northward. By drienne LaFrance.

How to explain Poland’s swing against the European Union? How to explain the election of the Catholic fundamentalist, authoritarian, populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a booming country... By James Meek.

Banks globally have paid $321 billion in fines since 2008 for an abundance of regulatory failings from money laundering to market manipulation and terrorist financing, according to data from Boston Consulting Group. That tally is set to increase in the coming years as European and Asian regulators catch up with their more aggressive U.S. peers, who have levied the majority of charges to date, BCG said in its seventh annual study of the industry published Thursday. Banks paid $42 billion in fines in 2016 alone, a 68 percent rise on the previous year, the data showed.

It’s almost too easy to imagine the scenario. After spending most of our adult life in paid employment, the golden day arrives. A well-earned retirement. Suddenly we’re released from the grip of office email and that long commute. Finally we can enjoy our remaining time on Earth pursuing those interests we’d never had time for, perhaps reconnecting with family and finishing those repairs on the house. Above all, time to relax.

China is closely following U.S. President Donald Trump's plans to create more domestic jobs by encouraging U.S. companies to bring home or "reshore" their overseas production, but the government will not change its overall strategy, Industry Minister Miao Wei said on Friday. "Regarding President Trump's efforts to revitalize U.S. manufacturing and allow more U.S. companies to move back to the United States, we are paying close attention to these policies but they will not affect the development of China's manufacturing industry," Miao said at a press briefing.

Trade unions have been demonized, demoralised and weakened by successive governments. In a time of immense economic inequality, Trade Union Congress leader, Frances O’Grady, is correct when saying “never has a strong, responsible trade union movement been so needed.” We live in an age of plentiful resources, yet these resources aren’t being shared, instead the super-rich are able to hoard wealth. In the past, unions metered this by bartering for higher wages and using their power to achieve change that benefited the working and middle class, such as equal pay, maternity pay, and health and safety laws.

China does not want world leadership but could be forced to assume that role if others step back from that position, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Monday, after U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to put "America first" in his first speech. Zhang Jun, director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's international economics department, made the comments during a briefing with foreign journalists to discuss President Xi Jinping's visit to Switzerland last week.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that globalization has powered worldwide growth and should not be blamed for the world's problems. In an attack on the anti-globalization rhetoric that has led to the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the Brexit vote in Britain, Xi told a packed audience at the World Economic Forum at Davos: "It is true that economic globalization created new problems, but this is no justification to write off economic globalization altogether.

The world's eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the 3.6bn people who make up the poorest half of the world, according to Oxfam. The charity said its figures, which critics have queried, came from improved data, and the gap between rich and poor was "far greater than feared". The richest eight include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett. Mark Littlewood, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said Oxfam should focus instead on ways to boost growth.

A new report by Oxfam warns of the growing and dangerous concentration of wealth. By Larry Elliott.

Today I want to explore the conflict between capitalism and open society, market values and social values. I am going to approach the subject indirectly, by first introducing a phenomenon that has attracted my attention only recently, but has assumed such importance in my thinking that I could almost call it the fourth pillar of my conceptual framework. That phenomenon is the principal-agent problem.

President Xi Jinping this month will become the first Chinese head of state to attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, which this year will dwell on the rising public anger with globalization and the coming U.S. presidency of Donald Trump. Xi will take centre stage at the Jan. 17-20 forum with China presenting itself as a champion of globalization.

President Obama took on a topic yesterday that most Americans don’t like to talk about much: inequality. There are a lot of ways to measure economic inequality (and we’ll be discussing more on Fact Tank), but one basic approach is to look at how much income flows to groups at different steps on the economic ladder. Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, has been doing just that for years. And according to his research, U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928.

A flurry of new reports have provided yet more data demonstrating that inequality is getting worse. All right, this does not qualify as a shock. But it really isn’t your imagination. The economic crisis, nearly a decade on now, has been global in scope — working people most everywhere continue to suffer while the one percent are doing just fine. One measure of this is wages.