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AMMAN / Reuters Jordan held local elections on Tuesday in a move officials say will help devolve some powers to larger cities and underdeveloped rural regions but which critics say falls short of promised wider political reform. The countrywide municipal vote – the first since 2013 – is a stated bid by the government to bring wider grassroots democracy that ...

ABOARD THE GOLFO AZZURRO / Reuters The Libyan coastguard intercepted a humanitarian rescue ship in the Mediterranean on Tuesday, ordering it to sail to Tripoli or risk being targeted, a Reuters photographer aboard said. It was the latest in a series of incidents in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs), operating on the edge of Libyan waters to rescue migrants trying to ...

ANKARA / Reuters Turkey has asked Germany to extradite a theology lecturer suspected of playing a major role in last year’s failed coup, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday. Turkey sent a diplomatic note requesting the extradition of Adil Oksuz, who the government says was the “imam” of air force personnel who last year bombed parliament as part of ...

As the world ponders the meaning of President Donald Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” on North Korea, it’s worth asking why his predecessors never took those steps to stop its nuclear program. When Bill Clinton was confronted with the threat of North Korea’s exit from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, he considered military force. But he ended up going for ...

President Donald Trump has thrown his support to the Cotton-Perdue bill to restrict legal immigration of low-skilled workers into the US by as much as 50 percent on the grounds it would raise the wages of American working families. That’s not what the economic evidence is showing, however. The only academically solid study of the impact of reducing legal immigration ...

Japan has served its time as a symbol of economic failure. Its latest growth surge puts it in a welcome new role. The country’s demographics, according to conventional wisdom, are supposed to be bad for the economy. Instead, Japan unexpectedly shot to the top of Group of Seven club, with its gross domestic product notching 4 percent annual growth last ...

President Donald Trump takes economic indicators seriously, except when he doesn’t. He’s boasted that recent stock market highs endorse his leadership; before the election, he said it was all a bubble. In the same way, before he took office, low unemployment was a phony number that meant nothing; now it’s a sure sign of success. In general, stock-market performance is ...

President Trump’s intensifying feud with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has led to speculation that this could be a prelude to a formal break with the Republican Party. I have no idea what’s going on in Trump’s mind. And it’s absolutely true that he’s constructed an inner circle in the White House that has very few connections to the Republican ...

Most experts debating bail-in and bail-out strategies agree that banks should build capital and shrink balance sheets as the best way to avoid a collapse and rebuild after one. But researchers are suggesting a more personalized version of that recipe that makes the difference between life and death for struggling firms. In a recent paper, Bank of Italy’s Emilia Bonaccorsi ...

In a recent episode of HBO’s sitcom “Silicon Valley,” a lawyer tries to extort money from a struggling startup by threatening to sue it for patent infringement. The troll, who understands nothing about the underlying technology, owns a patent so broad as to be unenforceable, but knows that the victims of his perfectly legal extortion scheme lack the financial resources ...