Opinion

  The latest U.S. easing of regulations on commerce with Cuba is good news, not least for fans of rum and cigars. But it’s also a sign that President Barack Obama’s drive to normalize relations is approaching the limits of his authority. With this new initiative, Obama has done about as much as he can to lighten the burden of ...

  Under a pledge made in 2009 in Copenhagen, the rich countries are supposed to give $100-billion annually to poor nations from 2020. This money is to be used in climate change mitigation. The 38 developed countries — who had signed the vow back then — on Tuesday said that they were “confident” of meeting the target. There was initial ...

  In a democracy, the “people” are the supreme arbiters, and their wisdom speaks through the electoral process. Such is the assumption on which the modern world has been built since God and monarchs began to fade from the scene. Lately, however, the wisdom of the people has felt a bit off-key. In one country after another, from the Philippines ...

  Of an estimated 2.6 billion mobile-phone owners in low- and middle-income countries last year, 1.4 billion were men and 1.2 were women, according to a study conducted for the mobile industry trade group GSMA. Most of that mobile-phone gender gap was concentrated in just one country, India, where 114 million fewer women than men had phones. This leads to ...

  In the 1930s, when U.S. started to build public housing, it was focused in the inner cities, because that’s where lots of poor people lived and worked. In recent decades, public housing is more about giving poor people vouchers, which allows them to move into the suburbs. As a result, poverty in the U.S. is no longer mainly an ...

Many of the prominent Conservative Party politicians who led the “leave” campaign in Britain’s referendum on the European Union did so with good intentions. They argued that leaving the EU would allow Britain to escape growth-shackling European policies, freeing markets both internally and externally. It is on this basis that “Economists for Brexit” predicted a Brexit boost of up to ...

  Another small step was taken last week on the steep and winding ascent back to constitutional norms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the nation’s second-most important court, did its judicial duty by reprimanding Congress for abandoning constitutional propriety. The court declared unconstitutional the unprecedented independence that Congress conferred on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This ...

  Only two years ago, 55 percent of Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, which was then part of the European Union. Since then, the U.K. has decided it does not want to be part of the EU, so Scottish nationalists now want another vote. If their fellow Scots agree, they should get it. Just not yet. Scotland ...

  Following the 2008 global recession, five major emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa joined hands to form the BRICS group in 2011. The bloc held a crucial meeting in Goa recently. Its top highlight was the pledge taken by the members to fast-track establishment of a new ratings agency as the existing ones — Moody’s, Standard ...

  There is good news when it comes to China’s scary and still-growing pile of debt: At least the government recognizes the problem. Its attempts to mitigate those risks, however, seem doomed to fall short. The government’s recent decision to create a market for credit default swaps is a case in point. The idea, as elsewhere, is to give banks ...