It’s hard to catch a breath in Brazil. Just the other day President Michel Temer dodged a brick, surviving potentially job-ending charges in electoral court that he’d won his mandate with dirty campaign money. Political bulls promptly declared Temer a survivor who would not only salvage vital political and economic reforms but also tough out his beleaguered presidency. But in ...

For leaders as well as friends, spouses and colleagues, grace is a precious characteristic. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s policy choices, our nation has never had a president more lacking in grace. Whether or not Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president, he was certainly its most gracious. On the eve of victory, Lincoln avoided triumphalism or crowing. Instead ...

North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile changes the strategic landscape in Asia — yet the options for dealing with Pyongyang are as ugly as ever. The overriding need is to exploit these limited possibilities more thoroughly and creatively. The Hwasong-14 ballistic missile launched earlier this week could be capable of reaching Alaska, and a missile that can hit ...

Ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union, analysts have debated the City’s fate. In 2016, the British financial services sector employed more than 1 million people (3.1 percent of all UK jobs) and contributed around 7.2 percent of the UK’s total gross value added, just over half of it from London. Any threat to the sector — and ...

Something is stirring in the world’s iron ore markets. As of last Friday, benchmark ore delivered to China’s Qinhuangdao port was down 28 percent since the start of the year to $56.75 a metric ton. Then, suddenly, things changed: In just four days this week, it’s recovered more than a third of those losses to $64.71. Barring a major crash ...

Volvo’s announcement that it intends to starts phasing out purely gasoline- and diesel-powered cars starting in 2019 in favor of electrified models appears strategically timed to coincide with the start of production of Tesla’s Model 3, which should be hitting the streets by the end of this month. It’s scary news for Tesla: The market for electric cars is largely ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the world’s largest oil exporter, increased production to an annual record last year before the kingdom led OPEC and other major producers to curb output to counter a global oversupply. Crude production averaged 10.5 million barrels a day compared with 10.2 million barrels in 2015, the state-owned company known as Aramco said in its annual ...

Bloomberg For the first time in more than 30 years, America’s nuclear plants have fallen behind wind farms, solar panels and other renewable energy suppliers as a source of electricity. In March and April, US power from utility-scale renewables topped output from reactors for the first time since July 1984, according to a US Energy Information Administration report. Supplies from ...

Bloomberg A seven-year, $7.5 billion effort to build a first-of-its-kind “clean coal” power plant in Mississippi is officially over. Mississippi regulators ordered utility owner Southern Co. to come up with a deal that’ll have the Kemper plant — once hailed by the Obama administration as the future of coal — running as a natural gas-fired generator instead. That ratified Southern’s ...

Bloomberg Oil joint ventures that account for about 40 percent of Venezuela’s output are being thrown into question by the man advising President Nicolas Maduro in rewriting the constitution. “We’re going to change it,” Hermann Escarra, a constitutional lawyer who participated in the crafting of the country’s current charter and is advising Maduro on attempts to rewrite it, said on ...