Opinion

  Is imported steel a threat to national security? How about aluminum? The White House has its suspicions, and plans to invoke an arcane statute to investigate. If the probes turn up anything, President Donald Trump will have essentially unlimited power to restrict or limit imports in response. Despite the administration’s claims, this sounds like a pretext for imposing tariffs …

  The US has sent aircraft carrier battle group and submarine in the Korean Peninsula; President Donald Trump warned a “major conflict” with North Korea was possible if diplomatic solutions fail; Senator John McCain said the US leader understood that military action was a last resort and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson mounted an effort at the United Nations to …

  There still hasn’t been anything close to the kind of spectacular bust seen in the early 2000s. As of today, all of the smart people who called a bubble during the past six years are still waiting for their predictions to be borne out Calling bubbles is hard. For example, take tech startups. In 2011, billionaire Mark Cuban — …

  Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos has made a career of being first in e-commerce. But in one critical area, he’s falling behind — thanks to Washington. While Bezos has been eager to deliver orders to customers in the US with drones, Amazon’s efforts have so far been stymied by outdated regulations. Meanwhile, JD.com Inc., an Amazon-like Chinese retailer, is soaring …

  Can Marine Le Pen still win the French election if her opponents don’t vote in the run-off vote on May 7? After many potential Hillary Clinton voters, certain of her victory, failed to turn out last year, Donald Trump won the US presidential election, so, by analogy, such an outcome seems somewhat possible. Yet there are strong reasons why …

  Let’s be clear: America is an undertaxed society. Our wants and needs from government — the two blur — exceed our willingness to be taxed. This has been true for decades, but it’s especially relevant now because the number of older Americans, who are the largest beneficiaries of federal spending, is rising rapidly. Unless we’re prepared to make sizable …

  A third strongman has managed to do what the two before him couldn’t: Sever the link between the stock markets of China and India. The correlation between the CSI 300 and the Nifty 50 indexes survived Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012 and Narendra Modi’s election in 2014. Donald Trump, however, has succeeded in driving through a wedge. …

  Smokestacks and tailpipes may be the biggest and most obvious sources of greenhouse gases, but they’re not the only ones to worry about. An invisible, underappreciated one is right in America’s front yards: leaking pipes that carry natural gas into people’s homes. The good news is that scientists have devised a clever way to find these leaks, by attaching …

  The leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Manila, where Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte stressed over the non-interference in one-another’s internal affairs. He said that the principles of the regional block are based on international law, mutual respect for independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity and national identity of all nations. Duterte urged his fellow …

  In recent decades, psychologists and economists have produced a flood of new findings about how human beings think and act. Those findings offer compelling lessons about how to change people’s behaviour. Governments have taken notice — and so has the private sector. There are terrific opportunities here, but also real risks. Behavioral scientists have established, for example, that people …