Rio De Janeiro / AFP Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff could see her coalition disintegrate this week amid a political crisis that threatens to topple her government, as a congressional committee ponders impeachment proceedings against her. Already the Brazilian bar association was expected to file a new request on Monday to Congress for her impeachment. But Rousseff’s real troubles begin on ...

Paris / AFP Tens of thousands of homes were without power in northwestern France early on Monday after the region was pounded overnight by winds gusting to hurricane force that also triggered flight cancellations and outages in southern England. Seven counties, in Normandy and Brittany were placed on “orange” alert, the second highest in Meteo-France’s three-stage warning system. At least ...

Seoul / AFP South Korea and Japan offered muted reactions on Monday to Donald Trump’s suggestion that, as president, he would withdraw troops from both countries and allow them to develop their own nuclear arsenal. There are nearly 30,000 US troops permanently stationed in South Korea and 47,000 in Japan, with little appetite for nuclear weapons in either nation. Asked ...

Presidential campaigns incite both hypochondria and euphoria, portraying the present as grimmer than it is and the future as grander than it can be. As an antidote to both, read a rarity, an academic’s thick book (762 pages) widely recognized as relevant to America’s current discontents. Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” argues that an unprecedented and ...

Urbanization is posing huge challenges to city planners across the world and these challenges are going to multiply, if the goal of improving quality of life is given a short shrift. Lack of vision and working with myopia will only aggravate the existing woes that urbanites are facing today. Estimates indicate that 70% of the global population will be urban ...

Edward Cavanough SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The attacks in Brussels last Tuesday that left 35 dead and hundreds wounded have rightly shocked Australians and stoked global condemnation. But what are the consequences, if any, of this appalling act for the Australian public and government? It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that a similar style attack in Australia is “probable,” according to ...

No issue has aroused more partisan passion over the past six years than the Affordable Care Act. Yet the law is playing only a secondary role in the U.S. elections. Sure, Republican presidential candidates cater to their base by vowing to repeal and replace Obamacare, and on the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont promises to replace it with ...

US politics today presents, to this foreign observer at least, a very un-American spectacle. A country originally built on immigration is awash with popular hatred against immigrants. A candidate of the right rails against free trade and foreigners, while that of the left proclaims his faith in socialism. Xenophobia is rife. Class war seems perilously close to the surface. The ...

The Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with the private sector is a sensitive one, both in ideological and practical terms. Though it remains a nominally communist state, China’s role as an economic superpower is owed entirely to the fundamental overhaul of its state-controlled economy. Starting with Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening” campaign in 1978, the government gradually ceded control over the ...

BLOOMBERG U.S. stock-index futures advanced and the dollar headed for the longest rally since October against the yen as speculation grew the world’s largest economy is strong enough to withstand another interest-rate increase. Oil rose for the first time in three days, sending Russia’s ruble toward the biggest gain in more than a week. Contracts on the Standard & Poor’s ...