International Politics

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.

From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy.

Penguin Audio presents Has the West Lost It? by Kishore Mahbubani, read by Jonathan Keeble. The West's centuries-old status as the centre of global wealth and power is coming to an end. As the new powers - China and India from Asia and others from Africa and Latin America - rise to the top of the world's pecking order, how should the West react?

Sean Dillon once again finds himself facing the murderous Rashid family and their oil-rich dynasty. After Kate Rashid watched her brothers’ lives being taken one by one as Sean Dillon and his undercover team foiled their plot to kill the president, she vowed to seek revenge. Now Sean Dillon is in her sights, but her plot to seek vengeance reaches far beyond the British agent or his team. She’ll get even with Dillon, White House operative Blake Johnson - even the US President if she needs to - and only she knows when or how.

The wait is over. After a two-year investigation, the results of The Mueller Report have been released to the public. Now listen to an audio version of one of the most talked about government documents in history. These are the redacted findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, which was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, including exploring any links or coordination between President Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.

1989 heralded a unique prospect for an enduring global peace, as harsh ideological divisions and conflicts began to be resolved. Now, three decades on, that peace has been lost. With war in Ukraine and increasing tensions between China, Russia, and the West, great power politics once again dominates the world stage. But could it have been different? Richard Sakwa shows how the years before the first mass invasion of Ukraine represented a hiatus in conflict rather than a lasting accord—and how, since then, we have been in a 'Second Cold War'.

In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.

Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group that he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of the communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data.

China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

From the author of the number one international best seller Gomorrah comes an electrifying investigation of the international cocaine trade, as vicious as it is powerful, and its hidden role in the global economy. In many countries, “000” flour is the finest on the market. It is hard to find, but it is soft, light, almost impalpable - like the purest, highest quality grade of cocaine. ZeroZeroZero is also the title of Roberto Saviano’s unforgettable, internationally best-selling exploration of the inner workings of the global cocaine trade.

MI6 operative Duncan Grant has been officially missing in action for the last six months. Going on deep-cover to hunt down those responsible for the death of a close ally. Half a world away, enjoying sedate retirement under new identities, former Albion agents are being murdered. And now there's only one left. Given an ultimatum to save the last Albion or face expulsion from the agency he's sacrificed so much for, Grant has no choice but to pursue both missions at the same time.

Since its founding in 1995, the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, has regained the majority of the domestic security functions of the Soviet-era KGB. Under Vladimir Putin, who served as FSB director just before becoming president, the agency has grown to be one of the most powerful and favored organizations in Russia. The FSB not only conducts internal security but also has primacy in intelligence operations in former Soviet states.

In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama’s first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today.The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill.

A top negotiator in countless high-stakes missions to free Americans captured abroad and held in the world's scariest prisons takes listeners inside the dramatic and shadowy world of international hostage rescue.

Why was an elegant lady brutally murdered the night before 9/11? Why was a successful New York banker not surprised to receive a woman's left ear in the morning mail? Why did a top Manhattan lawyer work only for one client, but never charge a fee? Why did a young woman with a bright career steal a priceless Van Gogh painting? All these questions and more are answered in Jeffrey Archer's novel, False Impression, but not before a breathtaking journey of twists and turns.

In the fifth edition of his best-selling Very Short Introduction work, Manfred B. Steger considers the major dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, ideological, and ecological. He looks at its causes and effects, and engages with the hotly contested question of whether globalization is, ultimately, a good or a bad thing.

Best-selling author Chris Turner brings listeners onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands of Alberta impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? This is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the life cycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.

Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear - both here and back home.