Moscow / AFP Russia on Wednesday said two of its warships were heading back to join its forces in the Mediterranean amid an upsurge in tensions with Washington over Syria. The announcement comes a day after Moscow said it had dispatched its S-300 air defence missile system to its naval facility at Tartus in Syria. The two Buyan-class corvettes ...

  Geneva/ AFP An air strike was responsible for the attack on an aid convoy in Syria that killed 18 people last month, a UN expert said on Wednesday. “With our analysis we determined it was an air strike,” said Lars Bromley, a researcher at the United Nations body UNOSAT, which collects and analyses satellite images. US officials have said ...

  The “quiet catastrophe” is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great ...

  The UK has put foreign doctors on notice: Their services will soon no longer be required. The government of Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans on Tuesday to make the National Health Service “self-sufficient” in the next decade. For a nation trying to burnish its image as an open and forward-looking society even as it cuts ties with Europe, ...

  Donald Trump keeps saying that the U.S. presidential election is rigged. Unlikely as this is, the perception of a hacked vote may be more dangerous than the reality. Last week, a Homeland Security Department official revealed that hackers had been poking around in the voter registration systems of more than 20 states. An earlier FBI memo disclosed ongoing investigations ...

  The online illegal wildlife trade is a roaring business today. And despite laws to stop the unholy practice, it goes on unabated. From cheetahs and bears to snakes, monkeys and mynahs, some websites advertise sale of exotic animals in blatant disregard of legislations and with unthinkable impunity. In 2014, a probe found that around 33,006 endangered wildlife and wildlife ...

  For all the partisan squabbling in this bizarre election year, a consensus has emerged in one important area: The U.S. corporate-tax system is broken. No matter who wins on Nov. 8, there’s surprising agreement that change is coming. To get ready, think tanks are pumping out reform proposals, tax experts are updating their research and Congress is holding hearings. ...

Back in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, there were a lot of people criticizing macroeconomics, and rightly so. Macro models had failed to include finance, and thus had failed to spot the warning signs in the runup to the crisis. Overconfident macroeconomists had declared that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” only to be caught flat-footed by ...

  The next US administration will inherit the worst relationship with Russia since Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire. Judging from the list of grievances that President Vladimir Putin has laid out, even a relatively Putin-friendly Donald Trump will have a hard time satisfying him. Putin delivered his message to the future U.S. president Monday, just as ...

London / AFP European stock markets retreated on Wednesday on speculation that the ECB is mulling plans to taper its vast economic stimulus that aims to prop up the eurozone economy. The European Central Bank has rebutted a Bloomberg report on Tuesday of an “informal consensus” among ECB policymakers that the guardian of the euro should gradually scale back its ...