Writing about oil prices is always risky. In a January 2015, I suggested that oil prices would not continue to fall, and even predicted that they would “finish the year higher than they were when it began.” I was wrong then; but I might not be wrong for much longer.

Being poor is a highly shameful experience, degrading one’s dignity and sense of self-worth. While the manifestations and causes of poverty differ, the humiliation that accompanies it is universal.

When Donald Trump was elected US president a year ago, some said the end of the Paris climate agreement was nigh.

The hurricanes that pummeled the Caribbean, Texas, and Florida this year left highways submerged, homes and businesses demolished, and lives lost.

Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States has turned mining – and the coal industry in particular – into a political cause célèbre over the last year.

No one should die from a preventable disease. Yet preventable diseases kill two million children every year, many of whom are too poor to afford proper treatment.

I am delighted that my first meeting with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations comes at a historic moment: the 50th anniversary of ASEAN’s founding.

With the United Nations’ climate change conference underway in Bonn, Germany, rising global temperatures are once again at the top of the world’s agenda.

In early October, shortly after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that his company could, given the opportunity, rebuild the island’s electrical grid using solar power.

Solutions to the climate crisis are often associated with big conferences, and the next two weeks will no doubt bring many “answers.” Some 20,000 delegates have now descended on Bonn, Germany, for the latest round of United Nations climate change talks.

Over the last few weeks, media around the world have been saturated with stories about how technology is destroying politics. In autocracies like China, the fear is of ultra-empowered Big Brother states, like that in George Orwell’s 1984.

Impressive quarterly results from the biggest technology companies show that they are nowhere near saturating their consumer markets, exhausting their innovation cycles, or reaching growth maturation.

I have always been a profound admirer of Spanish democracy, but especially since February 23, 1981. On that dramatic day, Colonel Antonio Tejero attempted a coup d’état against the young democratic regime.

The end of the fossil-fuel era is on the horizon. With renewables like solar and wind consistently outperforming expectations, growth in electric vehicles far exceeding projections, and governments worldwide acknowledging the urgency of tackling climate change, the writing is on the wall.

At the end of the six-day 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the roughly 2,200 delegates decided to add “Xi Jinping Thought on the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics” to the CPC’s constitution. With that, it became official: the era of Xi has begun.

Cities, the American-Canadian author Jane Jacobs once observed, are engines for national prosperity and economic growth.

Could the world soon witness another devastating war on the Korean Peninsula? That question looms large in many conversations these days.

Recent disease outbreaks, like Ebola and Zika, have demonstrated the need to anticipate pandemics and contain them before they emerge. But the sheer diversity, resilience, and transmissibility of deadly diseases have also highlighted, in the starkest of terms, just how difficult containment and prevention can be.

The Earth today is more than 1°C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times, and the terrible symptoms of its fever are already showing.

When the South African government attempted to amend its laws in 1997 to avail itself of affordable generic medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, the full legal might of the global pharmaceutical industry bore down on the country, delaying implementation and extracting a high human cost.

Last month, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released a status report tracking progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Europe finally appears to have moved past its multi-year economic crisis, but it remains unsettled. For every reason for optimism, there always seems to be a new cause for concern.

Free-market capitalism is on trial. In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn accuses neoliberalism of increasing homelessness, throwing children into poverty, and causing wages to fall below subsistence level. For the defense, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May cites the immense potential of an open, innovative, free-market economy. Similar “proceedings” are taking place around the world.

Within a few days, the Catalan regional parliament may declare Catalonia’s independence, after 500 years of history with Spain.

“Where is your toilet?” This is often the first question I ask when I visit the site of a cholera outbreak anywhere in the world. More often than not, the answer is: “We don’t have one. We go wherever we can.”