Bloomberg The race to lead South Africa’s ruling party is turning increasingly nasty. Allegations that Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, a front-runner for the post, had extra-marital affairs with at least eight women and paid expenses for some of them were splashed across the front page of the Sunday Independent, which cited Ramaphosa’s private emails to back up the story. It ...

A week ago I expressed the hope that President Donald Trump’s lamentable performance after the Charlottesville protests would hurt his standing in the polls. This didn’t happen. If there was a blip, it was in the other direction. I’d be pleased if Trump’s regrettable decision to pardon former sheriff Joe Arpaio dented his popularity, too, but I’m not holding my ...

William Cline is going against the grain. Cline, a well-known economist, isn’t convinced that the stock market is wildly overvalued. That’s an increasingly lonely view. “Warning Signs Mount as Stocks Stumble,” The Wall Street Journal headlined earlier this week. “Investors are running out of reasons to keep buying US stocks, exposing a growing number of warning signs,” the Journal wrote. ...

Want some good news? Illinois has become the 10th state with some form of automatic voter registration. Most of those are Democratic states, but in Illinois a Republican governor signed the bill, and Georgia, Alaska and West Virginia have adopted this reform as well. (An 11th state, North Dakota, doesn’t have voter registration at all.) So it’s not entirely partisan. ...

Britain’s exit talks with the European Union resume—following the release of position papers on what the UK government intends, and a notable change of approach by the opposition Labour Party. Up to a point, these developments are encouraging, but the basic problem remains: Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is moving far too slowly. The UK has now officially embraced the ...

As summer reached the high Himalayas this past June, one corner of the mountains turned hotter than expected. On a small plateau called Doklam, close to where the India-China border meets the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, two of the largest armies in the world faced off against each other. Chinese soldiers, convinced they were on Chinese territory, had brought equipment ...

Symbolic struggles over the Confederacy are uniquely American. But fierce battles over public spaces and monuments, and the values they elevate and enshrine, are not. “The French have their own versions of these battles,” said Peter Brooks, a professor of literature who has taught at Yale and Princeton. In such battles for cultural and political supremacy, history is a weapon. ...

In the affluent nations of northwestern Europe, people with university educations have taken over politics. Cabinet ministers with fancy degrees are nothing new, but more and more parliamentary seats have been going to college graduates. In some countries, the highly educated’s share of seats is completely unprecedented. In others, it hasn’t been this high since the 1800s, when politics was ...

Bloomberg Stocks fell and gold and the yen climbed as geopolitical tensions flared up again, with U.S. President Donald Trump weighing new economic sanctions that could target China after a nuclear test on Sunday by North Korea. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index declined, with all industry sectors in the red, after a report that Pyongyang is preparing to launch an ...

Reuters Stock markets in the United Arab Emirates were mostly quiet on Monday as they resumed trading after a long holiday weekend for Eid al-Adha, but Abu Dhabi-listed Dana Gas soared after it agreed on overdue payments from Iraqi Kurdistan’s government. Dana jumped 14.1 percent to 0.73 dirham, its highest level since early July, and was by far the market’s ...