Singapore is very proud of its reputation for technocratic excellence. In recent months, government officials have tried to tackle the country’s most pressing question — how to live with Covid-19 — by scrutinising, modeling and projecting data, as if staring hard enough at those little gray-rimmed boxes on Excel would produce the answer. The trouble with this strategy is that ...

Japan’s outgoing prime minister gave his successor, Fumio Kishida, a gift. In one of his last acts, Yoshihide Suga will lift emergency pandemic restrictions that have hampered the country’s most economically vital regions. It gets progressively harder for the new leader from there. Kishida emerged from a four-way ballot on Wednesday to become leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ...

Bloomberg The top US military leaders pointed rare criticism at key decisions by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden which they said undermined Afghanistan’s military and made it harder for American troops to remain as the nation’s government collapsed. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Trump’s 2020 peace deal with the Taliban had a ...