Opinion

Ever since Michael Flynn resigned as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser three years ago, the president and his allies have taken a keen interest in the practice of “unmasking.” Now his administration has revealed the names of the Obama officials who learned Flynn’s name in intelligence reports — but the information is hardly a smoking gun. Unmasking is a ...

The US economy has taken a turn for the worse — much worse. The collapse of the job market in late April and early May raises the question (for which there is no clear answer) of whether the economy has fallen into a depression or, if not, faces a long stretch of slow growth, high unemployment and stagnating incomes. The ...

The gradual reopening of India’s economy after a 43-day coronavirus lockdown has been marred by a hyper-centralisation of decision-making. Deepening mistrust between New Delhi and the 28 states threatens to splinter the country’s common market of 1.3 billion people, its biggest draw for investors. With infections surging by nearly 50% to cross 70,000 since the shutdown was eased about a ...

When Boris Johnson said “we must act like any wartime government,” he also meant Britain must spend like one — and the prime minister has certainly lived up to the promise. His Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak told Parliament that Britain had one of the most comprehensive financial relief plans for the Covid-19 outbreak anywhere in the world. That ...

You might think that the Supreme Court case regarding President Donald Trump’s tax returns is about him, or least about the power of the presidency. It isn’t. As the live-streamed oral arguments made clear, this is a case about Congress — and whether its oversight authority will be stripped away by an activist Supreme Court. The Constitution gives Congress “all ...

The US Treasury is planning to borrow almost $3 trillion during the second quarter (April to June) of 2020, a figure astounding in its size and implications. About $800 billion of that sum is designated as a financial reserve. If you were told that some or all of this reserve would be deployed by President Trump to win key voting ...

The shutdown of America’s high schools has deprived millions of students of rites we previously took for granted. Coursework can be transferred online to some degree, but no virtual environment can replace football games, choir concerts, musicals and so much more that’s part of the American high school experience. We may continue to yearn for such things well into the ...

States that are reopening their economies even as cases of Covid-19 are still rising are threatening their own residents and the whole country. But they are also running into two challenges that all states will face: Employees don’t want to return to work if they fear exposure to coronavirus on the job, and employers don’t want to get sued if ...

In nations around the world, the epidemiological number now getting all the attention is R, the effective reproduction number, which reflects the average number of new coronavirus cases resulting from a single infection. Germany estimates its R is now around 0.9, meaning the epidemic is waning there, if slowly. Estimates from two weeks ago in the US put R in ...

With the Justice Department’s move to drop its case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, it’s useful to go back to a basic question: If Flynn did nothing wrong when he called the Russian ambassador on December 29, 2016, the day President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the presidential election, why did he conceal it? ...