President Trump has styled himself in foreign policy as the Great Disrupter. And for a time, this unpredictable approach served him reasonably well. Leaders from China, North Korea and Iran found themselves off balance, and they sometimes made what looked like concessions. Trump’s problem is that, after two years, foreign nations seem to have figured him out. Rather than crafting ...

Social networks such as YouTube and Facebook have the power to make content go “viral,” spreading it at an unprecedented and uncontrollable pace. That seems innocent enough when you’re looking at a cat video, but if it’s murder, for example, the lack of a way of stopping the virus becomes glaring. After the New Zealand mosque shootings were streamed live ...

It’s no secret that India’s banking regulator hates having its officials sit on the boards of state-run lenders. The practice exposes the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to all kinds of potential conflicts it would rather avoid. So when the RBI used its special powers to appoint a former deputy governor as a director of Yes Bank Ltd., a non-state ...

Start with the good news: Some 150,000 migrants sought to enter Europe illegally last year. That represents a 92% drop since 2015. The number of people seeking asylum in 2018 was 646,000, less than half of what it was three years ago. In numerical terms, Europe’s migration crisis is over. Politically, the issue remains as divisive as ever. Ahead of ...

Fossil-fuel advocates have a favorite rejoinder to those who predict a global shift to renewable energy: Coal has never been more popular. It’s a decent argument because it happens to be true. While coal-fired power has declined by nearly a quarter in Europe and almost 40 percent in North America over the past decade, the change has been overwhelmed by ...

The discovery that hackers could snoop on WhatsApp should alert users of supposedly secure messaging apps to an uncomfortable truth: “End-to-end encryption” sounds nice — but if anyone can get into your phone’s operating system, they will be able to read your messages without having to decrypt them. According to a report in the Financial Times, the spyware that exploited ...

Boeing Co.’s 737 Max woes make it a prime target for China’s trade-war retaliations. China, responding to increased tariffs imposed by the US, said that it will boost levies on nearly 2,500 American products to 25%, while several thousand other items will be subject to taxes ranging from 5% to 20%. Soon after, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of China’s Global ...

Bloomberg Another week, another leg of the emerging-market rout. An MSCI gauge of developing-nation stocks slipped 3.7 percent, setting the stage for the worst month since October. It was even worse for currencies, which capped a fifth straight week of declines, erasing gains for the year. Brazil’s real led the drop as protests added to political tensions and growth forecasts ...

Bloomberg The Australian dollar is set to strengthen against the greenback after the nation’s center-right government clung to power in a surprise election victory at the weekend. Despite trailing in most opinion polls, Prime Minister Scott Morrison waged a relentless attack on the Labor Party’s progressive agenda to take action on climate change and strip tax perks from wealthy Australians. ...

Bloomberg The biggest Nordic asset managers are either holding on to, or increasing, stakes in banks dragged down by vast money laundering scandals. In a region where the concept of ethical investing is regularly held up as a goal, none of the big institutional investors contacted by Bloomberg said they would consider divesting shares of banks under investigation for laundering. ...