The Justice Department appears to be treading very carefully as it investigates President Trump’s lawyer. It must know that every legal step taken will be examined for integrity and fairness.

When it’s your candidate caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the case is politically motivated. When it’s your opponent, it’s the rule of law at work. For some Latin Americans, even if the motivation isn’t pure, they see democratic progress in the judiciary’s newfound ability to successfully challenge corruption in the executive branch.

Our newsroom analytics guy is fond of paraphrasing the physicist Lord Kelvin: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Increasingly, when it comes to fairness and equity for women in the workplace, measuring and transparency are the tools of progress.

The next story reflects the challenge of bias, xenophobia, and the demonizing of the “other” – meaning anyone perceived as different from ourselves. In Britain, the Labour Party is now facing the origins of those false fears.  

Whatever it brought in terms of unseasonable weather, April also delivered a shower of wonderful reads. From Greek mythology to Southern cuisine to a final outing for a beloved detective and a celebration of the revolutionary musical contributions of Rodgers and Hammerstein, here are the 10 books that most impressed the Monitor’s book critics. 

How will it end?

That’s the question hanging over the so-called trade war now being waged by the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China.

It’s easy to get lost in the tit-for-tat tariffs and other hard-knuckle penalties being used by each side to gain an advantage. In an April 10 speech, President Xi Jinping suggested China will continue on its government-driven path to be a technological superpower by 2025 despite US actions. And President Trump keeps repeating he will end China’s illegal use of American ingenuity, conducted through theft, forced technology transfers, and mandatory joint ventures.

The most likely outcome will be a negotiated truce. Yet beneath the current posturing, the trade dispute has also forced each side to look at its prime weak spot. For each, that is a perceived concern about an ability to invent new ideas that drive new services and products in a competitive global market. The final compromises to end this “trade war” may depend on how much each country changes its view of itself as able to invent and create new markets.

For the US, a report by the National Science Foundation in January warned that the country’s global share of science and technology activities is declining. The report recommends a number of ways for government, academia, and business to reboot the nation’s creative juices, such as increased federal spending on basic research.

In China, one big concern is not more government intervention but perhaps having less of it.

In an article last month, Chen QuQing, an economist working for the Communist Party, wrote that only 2 percent of patents that came out of Chinese universities have been transferred or licensed. “The country’s overall capacity for innovation falls short of the standards of other science and technology superpowers,” he states. While China spends heavily on research, “a lot of research has failed to produce useful or marketable technologies.”

The main reasons are a poor capability for original innovation, a lack of high-quality talent, and a low rate of applied uses for basic research. China’s economy and its scientific work “remain two highly disjointed fields,” he wrote.

Who should drive innovation? he asks. The answer is market entities, Mr. Chen concludes.

China’s most creative private companies are demanding better legal protections of their ideas in the domestic market. That shift in thinking is forcing Mr. Xi to speed up reforms of the patent system. For the US, such reforms must also apply to foreign companies who want to operate in the Chinese economy.

If each side can only recognize a common interest in fostering innovation – no matter where it happens – the “trade war” could end sooner rather than later.