Opinion

  For seven years, Republicans have yearned to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Now that they have the chance, they seem wholly unprepared to do it right. Much work is still needed to figure out how to avoid destabilizing the health-insurance system. Yet, in their hurry, leaders in Congress seem to want to skip that part. What’s the rush? Republicans ...

  It seems that the noise created over Russian hacking saga is not going to die down soon. The story that unravelled has the makings of a spy thriller. It all began in September 2015 with an FBI agent informing Democratic National Committee that FBI had identified a Russian-linked cyber-spy group in its network. It was followed by a Washington ...

  “Give me 50 days, friends,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked citizens after he canceled 86 percent of the country’s currency notes. After December 30, if Indians saw his decision as flawed, he promised to “suffer any punishment.” But, he said confidently, if they could bear 50 days of disruption, they would have the “India of their dreams.” It ...

  China’s promise to shut down its commercial ivory trade by the end of the year is good news for Africa’s elephants. For the Chinese government, though, it creates a strange problem: what to do with its 40-ton stockpile of ivory, worth about $150 million. Although that may not sound like a lot, how China approaches that hoard may be ...

  This time of year is peak forecasting season — holiday retail sales, lists of stocks you should buy this year and, of course, market forecasts all keep economists, strategists and analysts busy. I always make time to mock some of the sillier approaches to prediction-making. Indeed, I have been doing this for so long that some pushback has developed ...

  One of the most tangible consequences of the UK’s June vote to quit the European Union was the immediate collapse in the value of the pound. The combination of a huge political upset — which saw the resignation of a national leader — and the prospect of a wounded economy drove sterling lower on the foreign exchange market in ...

  The operating system war has started again. The once white-hot fights over the dominant operating software for PCs and smartphones are settled, of course. Microsoft won PCs. In smartphones, Android won on volume and Apple Inc. won on profits. Now that computing is spreading into everything from jet engines to T-shirts, the old and new tech combatants are vying ...

  The duration of the latest Syrian cease-fire may matter less than its genesis. Russia, Turkey and Iran brokered the agreement without U.S. involvement — a worrying sign of the waning regional influence of the world’s only superpower. Whether this decline is temporary or permanent remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is that, having decided not to intervene ...

  Negotiations between Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot leader, and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart, Mustafa Akinci, in November failed to find any solution for decades-old division of Cyprus. The talks, held in Switzerland, were supposed to produce a map of the internal boundaries of a future federation on Cyprus and pave the way for broader talks. But the two-day session ...

  On January 6, the Labor Department will release the final monthly employment report of what has been an historic eight-year run of jobs growth during the Barack Obama administration. This period confirmed some of our beliefs about the economy but also exposed the limitations of our understanding of a structurally changing employment situation. Here are three main takeaways from ...