Jackie Northam

When you cross over the Granville Street Bridge that winds into downtown Vancouver, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in Hong Kong. The skyline has the same ribbon of gleaming apartment towers hugging the waterfront, and similar mountains in the distance.

There is also an unabashed display of wealth, readily apparent in the city's Kitsilano neighborhood. Within a few short blocks, you can find dealerships for some of the world's most expensive cars: Lamborghini, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin, among others.

Last week, at the tail end of a monthlong trial in a federal court in Boston, a tall and impeccably dressed man took the witness stand. Jean Leonard Teganya, a Rwandan, raised his hand and took an oath to tell the truth.

For the next three hours, Teganya's lawyer probed where he was and what he did during the genocide that engulfed Rwanda 25 years ago. More than 800,000 people were slaughtered over the course of about three months.

On a drizzly day earlier this month, a gaggle of mostly Chinese protesters gathered outside a provincial Supreme Court in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Inside the court, an extradition hearing was underway to decide whether to send Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, to be prosecuted in the United States.

In 2014, a 25-year-old Saudi woman, Loujain al-Hathloul, got behind the wheel of a car and drove from the United Arab Emirates into Saudi Arabia. She took a video in which she's shown wearing sunglasses, a headscarf and a huge smile.

For women, driving was banned in the ultra-conservative Saudi kingdom, and Hathloul's road trip landed her in jail for more than two months.

The State Department on Thursday ordered employees to return to work next week, despite the partial government shutdown, saying it would figure out how to cover the next paycheck.

In a note posted on its website and emailed to staff, the department said it "is taking steps to make additional funds available to pay employee salaries."

If the shutdown continues beyond the next pay period, State Department officials say they will have to work with Congress to reprogram funds in order to cover salaries.

The international blowback to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is making things uncomfortable for Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at this year's Group of 20 summit, which began Friday in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Trump administration hopes the sweeping sanctions it has imposed on Iran's oil, shipping and banking industries will cripple its economy and force it to negotiate a new nuclear deal.

But analysts point out that while such economic penalties can be persuasive, there are also ways to circumvent them.

"There will always be both overt and covert activities to work around sanctions, to dodge sanctions or evade them," says Dan Wager, a global sanctions expert at the consulting firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions. "That's something that's gone on for a very long time."