Opinion

  Recent high-profile terror attacks pose a new challenge for police and intelligence services. All seem to be the work of lone wolf actors. Yet police and intelligence services, by the nature of their work, target groups. It’s possible to adjust that focus, but that would require Western societies to make an important trade-off. On Monday, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum ...

  At some point, everyone knew, Netflix’s subscriber growth in the U.S. had to slow down. The company’s video-streaming service is nearing market saturation among its core demographic — affluent young-to-middle-aged people — meaning further gains will be harder to come by. Still, it was a bit of a shock for investors to learn from Monday’s earnings report that Netflix ...

  The unsettling reality of today’s world is that a bad mood can move readily from one country to another, even when events on the ground call for moderation or optimism. Or in the language of financial economics, emotional and ideological contagion is becoming a more important source of systemic risk. The spread of revolutions during the Arab Spring showed ...

  WASHINGTON Let’s salute an unlikely champion of saving energy and switching to alternative fuels — the US Navy. Once a supreme fuel-guzzler whose energy needs sometimes dictated foreign policy, the Navy has become a model for how the country can curb its appetite for fossil fuels. The Navy’s energy diet began seven years ago with an edict from newly ...

  An ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that brings 12 nations together, and accounts for 40 percent of the global economy, faces enormous challenges in terms of ratification in the US Congress, and rejection by the presidential candidates. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has outrightly rejected the TPP though a number of Republicans more Democrats back the agreement. Democratic ...

  Harsh V. Pant SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Dealing a major blow to Beijing’s insistence that it has special rights to South China Sea and in a victory for the Philippines, an international tribunal of judges decided that China’s claims to the critical waterway are without legal merit. The ruling, handed down by a tribunal based at the Hague’s Permanent ...

  There seems to be this idea that just won’t go away — that two or more quarters of negative economic growth mark a recession. This is, of course, incorrect. But it persists, and seems to get new life with every unsettling economic event, because people don’t understand the basics surrounding what an economic contraction is or how we measure ...

Given his fearsome rhetoric and blunt speaking it is not surprising that many fear that the new populist president of the Philippines could have a destabilizing impact on the region. Some worry his “Dirty Harry” persona could tip the republic into conflict with China and, through the Philippines’ alliance with the United States, drag the region into a major conflagration. ...

  Adam Minter The skylines of some of China’s biggest cities sprout from land that was farmed less than a generation ago. For the government, they’re a soaring testament to the country’s transformation into an urbanized superpower. And despite China’s economic slump, there are plenty of bureaucrats who’d like to see the process continue. According to a report last week, ...

  Mark Gilbert The Bundesbank dropped something of a bombshell this week. The eurozone’s most influential central bank and the guardian of all things sacred to monetarists, suggested that sovereign bonds should contain clauses that would automatically delay repayment to investors for countries in financial difficulty. Not paying on schedule may not be the same as default, but it won’t ...