Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally decided that the stock market’s tantrum over the past month was too noisy to ignore. Traders bemoaned the fact that Powell considered the central bank’s balance-sheet runoff to be on “automatic pilot.” So he softened his tone on January 4 during a panel at an American Economic Association meeting in Atlanta, saying policy makers ...

Some likened it to a snowman. Others to a peanut. Still others to an embryonic dinosaur. Ultima Thule, a mottled and malformed space rock at the farthest edge of the solar system, got its first close-up photos this week thanks to Nasa’s New Horizons mission. They offered a glimpse of the most distant object ever visited by man-made machinery — ...

The damage caused by President Trump’s trade fight with China has spread farther and faster than many expected. Factories in China and the US have seen orders slump. American farmers are hurting. A collapse in Chinese demand for iPhones knocked nearly $75 billion off Apple Inc.’s market cap in a single day. Slower growth just prompted China’s central bank to ...