Two dozen men and women sit in a circle at a training center an hour’s drive from Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Molly Melching, a warm American in her 60s who is Tostan’s founder and chief executive officer, listens attentively as participants share what they’ve learned. With support from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, these individuals are learning about human rights at Tostan.

Until this week Mr. Trump has been largely uninvolved in twisting arms and bending ears in an effort to win passage of the bill. In recent days Trump has thrown himself into lobbying for a health-care “win,” but his message has at times contradicted itself, while the bill teeters on the edge of extinction. The irony is that the image Trump has long sold – the dealmaker, the negotiator, and the guy who gets everybody in the room to “yes” – might be somebody America could really use at the moment.

For veteran observers in the Middle East, the revelation that the UAE may have hacked Qatar’s news agency, precipitating a diplomatic crisis, reads like the rejected plot for a spy novel. Since the so-called Arab Spring erupted seven years ago, Arab governments and intelligence agencies have spent millions on spyware, malware, and hacking services, experts and analysts say, waging a digital battle against their own citizens.

The closer that economists look at the rise in income inequality, the more they find one cause may be the rise of another inequality: The least productive firms are falling further behind the most productive firms. This point was made in a recent study spanning 16 countries by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It found the “productivity gap” between firms in the top 10 percent by productivity and those in the bottom 10 percent rose by about 14 percent from 2001 to 2012.