For a time, it looked like our defenses might hold. The extraordinary lockdown of China’s Hubei province over the past month had at times appeared to be halting the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. For much of that period, new cases outside China were running at just a dozen or so a day, most of them with clear connections back ...

A decision by Thailand’s constitutional court to ban the second-largest opposition party should be a boost for Prayuth Chan-Ocha, junta leader turned elected prime minister. Future Forward’s leaders were among his highest-profile critics. Yet the long sought-after victory looks Pyrrhic. The former general’s problems have been piling up. Thailand’s flatlining economy, already suffering from the worst drought in decades, is ...

It’s long been obvious that one of Germany’s formerly grand centrist parties, the left-leaning SPD, is in decline. But another and even grander centrist bloc, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel, had hopes of avoiding that fate, by defending the hallowed middle ground in politics. Suddenly, though, Germany is having a full-bore political crisis of centrism. Since ...