Mesdames Secretaries

This week marks a decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the implosion of Wall Street and the beginning of the global financial crisis — the effects of which the world is still feeling today. In this beautifully-crafted Reuters interactive, five reporters examine what has — and hasn't — changed in the last 10 years, with respect to politics, markets, wealth distribution, and more. 

Earlier this year, it was widely predicted that Cape Town's dams and reservoirs would soon dry up, resulting in a lack of water. "Day Zero" has yet to arrive, and while some in South Africa see it as a manufactured crisis, as Vann R. Newkirk II writes in The Atlantic, "Cape Town’s reality will soon impact many global cities, where water will become a constant concern, and democracy will become contingent upon the taps."

Spiegel Online's Matthias Gebauer and Christoph Schult speak with Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland about her relationship with her German counterpart, renegotiating NAFTA in the shadow of a trade war, Ontario premier Doug Ford, Canada's spat with Saudi Arabia, and more. 

Is the ideology that won the Cold War in crisis? In The Guardian, Madeleine Schwartz unpacks the idea that the system put in place following the Second World War — the transatlantic relationship that props up the liberal international order — "worked well until Donald Trump came along and knocked it down as if he were laying the foundations for a new casino."