The English are obsessed with owning property but Boris Johnson’s government worries that they’ve not been buying nearly enough houses lately. As elsewhere, the UK housing market was put into suspended animation for several weeks to help contain Covid-19. Now Johnson’s finance minister, Rishi Sunak, apparently plans to put a rocket under the market by temporarily scrapping transaction taxes — ...

The politics of “law and order” have long been a repository of cultural and racial grievance. In his 1999 book, “From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994,” Dan T Carter, a celebrated historian of the American South, describes a pioneering political advertisement from Wallace’s 1970 campaign for governor of Alabama: Radio spots depicted the dramatic ...

Bloomberg Chancellor Angela Merkel urged the European Union to pull together to face the historic challenges stemming from the coronavirus and changes threatening the bloc’s economic standing. In Brussels after Germany assumed the six-month rotating EU presidency this month, Merkel called for solidarity to tackle the pandemic as well as the risks posed by climate change and the transition to ...