In Canada, most citizens are indifferent to the British Crown — making the official Canadian spectacle of mass mourning for Queen Elizabeth II feel particularly ridiculous.

Clashing priorities as dental care advocates, Canadian Dental Association seek to fill in program details

In Britain, people are now being arrested just for saying things like “Who elected him?” about the newly crowned King Charles. It’s a shocking authoritarian clampdown — and it’s being applauded by the supposedly “pro-free-speech” right.

The Taiwan question remains unresolved, more than 70 years after the end of the Chinese civil war. The U.S. stokes the fires of this divisive issue on a regular basis, keeping the government of the People’s Republic in Beijing on the defensive.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has sounded the alarm about “civil unrest” this winter as prices across Europe soar, even while demanding public money be used to send yet more weapons to Ukraine. The question is whether Western publics will keep buying the narrative of an existential threat that can only be dealt with if they, rather than their leaders, dig deep into their pockets.

Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality. Since wages and natural resource prices are much lower in the global South than the North, poor countries must export many more units of embodied labour and resources than they import in order to achieve a monetary balance of trade. This creates a constant transfer of labour and ecology from the periphery to the core, developing the latter but impoverishing the former.