Seoul/ AFP South Korea warned on Sunday of possible North Korean assassinations and kidnappings in revenge for recent high-profile defections to the South. With tensions also high before a large-scale South Korea-US military exercise starting on Monday, the Unification Ministry in Seoul said Pyongyang was bent on provocation. A ministry official told reporters the defection to Seoul of North Korea’s ...

  Bangkok / AFP Two Chinese nationals will go on trial this week for their alleged roles in a deadly bombing at a Bangkok shrine one year ago, an attack whose motive remains clouded in mystery following a murky and at times surreal investigation. The trial, which starts on Tuesday, is being held at a military court in Bangkok and ...

  Srinagar / AFP Indian soldiers killed three suspected rebels in a gun battle on Sunday in Indian-administered Kashmir, the army said, as the region reels from weeks of deadly violence between protesters and security forces. The rebels were killed in Tangdhar north of the main city of Srinagar after crossing over from the Pakistani side of the heavily militarised border ...

  An aging America reduces the economy’s growth — big time. That’s the startling conclusion of a new academic study, and if it withstands scholarly scrutiny, it could transform our national political and economic debate. We’ve known for decades, of course, that the retirement of the huge baby-boom generation — coupled with low birthrates — would make the United States ...

Lots of presidential-campaign observers have been questioning the numbers in Hillary Clinton’s plan to make public colleges and universities “free” for students whose families earn below a set threshold. And I will admit that I am a longtime skeptic of proposals to further subsidize higher education. But one thing critics such as myself tend to overlook is the positive value ...

  New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, on most days simply a bore to pass through, descended into chaos last weekend. Waves of confusion rippled through its terminals when passengers, thinking a terrorist attack was underway, stampeded haphazardly in search of refuge. It was all for nothing. There was no attack, no “active shooter.” Evidently, a crowd watching the Olympics ...

  With plunging copper prices, weak currency, ballooning budget deficit and skyrocketing inflation, Zambia is grappling with an unprecedented economic challenge. And the newly re-elected President Edgar Lungu has an extremely tough job at hand — to remedy the various ills ailing the country’s economy. There was a time when the southern African nation had seen the GDP growing at ...

  Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has written the best article I’ve read on Britain’s exit from the European Union. In an essay for the New York Review of Books he makes many excellent points, but one is of surpassing importance. It’s an obvious point, or ought to be, that nonetheless has been almost entirely ignored ...

  Of all living things, why do humans alone create advanced technology? Not long ago, scientists thought it was because we are the only intelligent life form on this planet. That explanation alone no longer suffices. Over the last decade, scientists have discovered that crows can use tools, hyenas can cooperate to solve complex problems, jays can plan for the ...

  “Communism would have worked, if the Soviet Union had only tried it for real.” I must have heard this argument a dozen times from die-hard leftist friends. Marxist economists such as Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick even wrote a book making exactly this claim. No doubt, true believers will be just as unwavering in the face of Venezuela’s collapse. ...