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the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players

Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade

Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.

Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.

A tumultuous year in oil markets left the energy industry reeling and gave fresh impetus to a perennial debate: What is the best gauge of crude prices?

The Covid-19 pandemic confined billions of people to their homes and shut or slowed portions of the global economy in 2020, crimping demand for oil.

The crisis reached its crescendo in April, when the price of light, sweet U.S. crude futures dived below $0 a barrel for the first time. Some traders were paying others to take oil off their hands.

If you order snapper at a restaurant, you probably expect to be served snapper. But multiple reports over the last decade say there's a strong chance you'll be getting a lower-value fish.

Consumers could be paying double the price for wild-caught salmon, but being served the farmed equivalent. Or they may think they're eating fresh-off-the-boat lobster, which has in reality been frozen for months.

Tackling fish fraudRead MoreDiners ordering fish at Rockfish, a beachfront Italian restaurant, receive a QR code with their order.

Today, on the opening day of COP28, the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, the host country pushed through a decision that wasn’t expected to happen until the last possible minute of the two-week gathering: the creation and structure of the “loss and damage” fund, which will source money from developed countries to help pay for climate damages in developing ones. For the first time, the world has a system in place for climate reparations.

Nearly every country on Earth has now adopted the fund, though the text is not technically final until the end of the conference, officially slated for December 12.

“We have delivered history today—the first time a decision has been adopted on day one of any COP,”

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been engaged in secret contacts with the Taliban about reaching a peace agreement without the involvement of his American and Western allies, further corroding already strained relations with the United States.

The secret contacts appear to help explain a string of actions by Mr. Karzai that seem intended to antagonize his American backers, Western and Afghan officials said.

The clandestine contacts with the Taliban have borne little fruit, according to people who have been told about them. But they have helped undermine the remaining confidence between the United States and Mr. Karzai, making the already messy endgame of the Afghan conflict even more volatile.

The army disabled the cellphone networks, so residents scramble to higher ground to capture stray signals from Afghan networks. And Internet cafes were shut, on orders from the Taliban, after complaints that young men were watching pornography and racy movies.

That ban distressed families that use the Internet to communicate with relatives working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and across the Persian Gulf states.

Journalists face particular risks.

Donald Trump in Twitter spat with Saudi Prince Alwaleed

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said on Twitter that Mr Trump should give up his presidential ambitions because he would never win.It follows Mr Trump's call for Muslims to be barred from entering the US for security reasons.

Who is Prince Alwaleed?

When a country begins to fall into economic and political difficulty, wealthy people are often the first to ship their money to safer havens abroad. The rich don’t always emigrate along with their money, but when they do, it is an even more telling sign of trouble.

Since 2013, New World Wealth, a research outfit based in South Africa, has been tracking millionaire migrations by culling property records, visa programs, news media reports and information from travel agents and others who cater to the wealthy.

In a global population of 15 million people each worth more than $1 million in net assets, nearly 100,000 changed their country of residence last year.

“the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.

The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.

One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds

China had typically offered infrastructure-for-energy and other business deals.

“There is hope in the East,” one Arab businesswoman in the United Arabian Emirates told me.

The implications are clear: China has long represented an alternative in the global market for influence once dominated by Washington;

Among the businesses was the Swiss jewelry company, which records and interviews reveal was led by a team recruited from Boston Consulting. They ran it into the ground. Under their watch, millions of dollars in Angolan state funds helped finance the annual parties on the French Riviera.

When Boston Consulting and McKinsey signed on to help restructure Sonangol, Angola’s state oil business, they agreed to be paid in an unusual way — not by the government but through a Maltese company Ms. dos Santos owned.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, now called PwC, acted as her accountant, consultant and tax adviser, working with at least 20 companies controlled by her or her husband. Yet there were obvious red flags as Angolan state money went unaccounted for, according to money-laundering experts and forensic accountants who reviewed the newly obtained documents.

In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.

these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources.

Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.

The United States and China, the world’s two largest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels.

The United States and China, the world’s two largest climate polluters, have agreed to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels, the State Department said Tuesday.

The statements of cooperation released separately by the United States and China on Tuesday do not include a promise by China to phase out its heavy use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, or to stop permitting and building new coal plants. That has been a sticking point for the United States in months of discussions with Beijing on climate change.

Countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels

who should transition first? What should determine each nation’s ambition? These efforts will be expensive. Who should pick up the tab?

The “Global Stocktake” from Dubai, like statements from earlier conclaves, got around these questions with the standard diplomatese:

“And then we became the first COP to host a change-makers majlis,” Al Jaber said in his prepared closing speech. “And I felt that that was the turning point in our negotiations. You reconnected with your spirit of collaboration, you got out of your comfort zones and started speaking to each other from the heart.”

“That,” he said, “made the difference.”Could a majlis really do all that? Or did the sultan overstate the benefits of the majlis because it was kind of his thing? I looked into these questions and came away thinking that the sultan was on to something. The majlis is a tradition of the Arab world that just might have a role on the world stage.

A majlis (pronounced MAHJ-liss) is both a place and an event. It is the place in an Arab home where people sit with guests. Often the richer the homeowner, the bigger the majlis. Traditionally there are carpets, cushions, a teapot, an incense burner. In a majlis, people don’t rush to do business. Sociably sitting is part of the experience.

JERUSALEM — Government ministers from Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed a free-trade agreement on Tuesday that, once ratified, would be the widest-ranging deal of its kind between Israel and an Arab country and the latest example of deepening ties between the Jewish state and some Arab governments.

But officials said that once confirmed, the agreement would loosen restrictions on almost all trade between the two countries and could increase its annual value 10-fold within five years.

For decades, Israel was ostracized by all but two Arab countries,