Democracy and Standards

A recent survey by Patriotic Millionaires UK shows that a majority of millionaires in G20 countries supports a 2% tax on wealth. When asked if any millionaires with a wealth of more than $10 million should pay the tax, 58% of the more than 2,000 millionaire survey participants said yes. As part of the same survey, 75% agreed that billionaires ...

Together, China and the United States accounted for almost half of world military expenditure in 2024. The U.S. was the biggest defense spender at  $997 billion. This made up 37 percent of the world’s military spending. China came in second place with the equivalent of an estimated $314 billion, accounting for 12 percent of the global military budget. China increased spending ...

The re-emergence of nationalism and protectionism are undoing the effects of globalisation on world trade. Global trade growth stagnated in the wake of the financial crisis, during the first Trump administration, when US-Chins trade tensions erupted and in the wake of  the Covid-19 pandemic. World trade bounced back with the global trade-to-GDP ratio peaking at 62.8 percent in 2022 before ...

Close to 300,000 women are estimated to die during pregnancy or childbirth each year, while over two million babies die in their first 28 days and a further two million are stillborn. Despite major advances in the prevention of both maternal and newborn mortality, figures for both remain high, particularly in low-resource settings. The International Council of Nurses (ICN) and ...

The death penalty continues to be quite widespread in Asia, with China, India, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia, among others, employing it, according  to Amnesty International. The death penalty is rare in Europe and the Americas – with the notable exceptions of Belarus, Guyana, Cuba and the United States – and more common in Africa and the Middle East. 110 countries ...

Japan has the third highest number of active U.S. troops deployed of any country outside of the contiguous U.S., at 52,852 personnel followed by Germany at 34,894 and South Korea at over 23,000, according to data from the Defense Manpower Data Centers. As of June 2024, there are 165,830 active US personnel overseas, rising to 1,294,191 active personnel when including ...

Women in the U.S. had to work through 2024 and into March of 2025 to earn the equivalent of the 2024 wages of U.S. men which means that American working women are paid 83 cents for every dollar that men make. Women’s income in the U.S. overall shrunk recently, pushing the U.S. equal pay day back from March 12 to ...

Vaccines have been around since May 14, 1796 – Edward Jenner’s small pox vaccination. Some diseases have been eradicated with no new cases of polio or smallpox in decades in the United States compared to a 20th century average of more than 10,000 cases per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Progress in eradicating measles has ...

16,000 US federal employees have been sacked under presidential executive orders, reckons Statista, which is in addition to the  75,000 federal employees who took buyouts. Both numbers combined make up less than 4% of the 2.4 million-strong non-military and non-postal federal workforce. 6,700 employees at the US Internal Revenue Service who are on probation  are likely to be fired  under ...

Almost 7 million Ukrainians have decamped and  been registered in other countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Over three million have gone to Germany, Russia and Poland with the rest going to the Czech Republic, the UK, Spain, Romania, Italy and Slovenia An additional 3.7 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced. 59% of recorded Ukrainian ...