[Mihir Sharma] India finds reform, not reformers

Checking out of a hotel in the southern Indian state of Kerala this week took so long that I almost missed my flight. It wasn’t the hotel staff’s fault; their work, temporarily, had been doubled. As a polite note in my room reminded me when I checked in, they would have to present two invoices to me when I left -- one for the days prior to July 1, and one for the days after. For at midnight on July 1, India migrated to a new, more comprehensive indirect tax regime, known as the goods and service

July 9, 2017

[Carl P. Leubsdorf] Trump is giving political inexperience a bad name

One of Barack Obama’s principal arguments in seeking the presidency was that his stance as an outsider uninvolved in past Washington battles would enable him to break through the capital’s pervasive partisanship.But the neophyte president actually achieved his principal legislative success by hiring experienced Washington operatives who joined with veteran congressional Democrats in passing legislation designed to produce the party’s long-sought goal of health care coverage for all Americans.Aft

July 9, 2017

[Leonid Bershidsky] Tesla is starting to face serious competition

Volvo’s announcement that it intends to starts phasing out purely gasoline- and diesel-powered cars starting in 2019 in favor of electrified models appears strategically timed to coincide with the start of production of Tesla’s Model 3, which should be hitting the streets by the end of this month. It’s scary news for Tesla: The market for electric cars is largely government-driven, and Chinese-owned Volvo is taking advantage of especially generous government support.Volvo’s model cycle is about

July 7, 2017

[Other view] Turn to cyber options against North Korea

North Korea’s protracted policy of nuclear belligerence toward the United States has reached a long-feared tipping point. Despite a diligent campaign of sabotage and defensive saber-rattling by the Obama and now Trump administrations, Pyongyang has successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, raising the specter of another launch, this time armed with a nuclear warhead.Even if the cities of America’s Pacific coast are somehow kept safe from obliteration, a nuclear North is intolera

July 7, 2017

[Noah Feldman] New travel ban rules distort family dynamics

President Donald Trump’s administration has issued guidelines through the State Department for who will be exempt from the travel ban from six majority Muslim countries, which the US Supreme Court allowed Monday to partly go into effect. The guidelines are highly arbitrary in defining what counts as a family relationship that merits exemption. For example, your mother-in-law is close enough to come into the US, but not your grandmother, a blood relative without whom you wouldn’t exist.That’s bec

July 6, 2017

[Trudy Rubin] Trump must join fight against disinformation

President Donald Trump’s twitter tirade against MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski last week revealed more than his continued willingness to demean his office — and women.He lambasted Brzezinski, co-host of Morning Joe, as “low I.Q., Crazy Mika” claiming she’d been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she briefly attended a social gathering at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve. On the surface, this was one more meltdown by a thin-skinned president who can’t stand criticism from mainstream journalists — which

July 6, 2017

[Letter to the Editor] Lessons for America from Korea: Mass protest works

When I moved to South Korea in 2015, I was impressed the country had a female president. In 2016, I thought the US would follow suit. Unfortunately, the unthinkable happened: Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Before Trump was elected (he lost the popular vote by more than 3 million by the way), Korea had its own political crisis with Park scandal. And yet, the Korean people moved swiftly and in unison with a single goal in mind: Impeach President Park. Public protests

July 6, 2017

[David Ignatius] Cooperation with Russia key to peace in Syria

When Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin this Friday in Hamburg, Germany, the two presidents should have in the back of their minds the insignia worn by the Syrian Democratic Forces militia, which is America’s main ally in Syria. The patch shows a map of Syria bisected by the sharp blue line of the Euphrates River.The Euphrates marks the informal “deconfliction” line between the Russian-backed Syrian regime west of the river and the US-backed and Kurdish-led SDF to the east. In the past several we

July 5, 2017

Trump’s tweets prove again, billionaires don’t know best

By now, the rational or at least nonmisogynistic among us have had an opportunity to be appalled by US President Donald Tweet’s recent Trumps (or is that backwards? It’s hard to remember) regarding the hosts of “Morning Joe,” a cable TV talk show about which the president is apparently fixated. The exact language of the comments hardly deserves to be repeated again, but the nastiest (and loudest cry for psychiatric help from within the White House) was directed at Mika Brzesinski and touched on

July 5, 2017

[Ben Carlson] Baby boomers will live long but might not prosper

Investors are constantly reminded that it’s impossible to avoid risk in their portfolio. People are worried about geopolitical risk, interest rate risk, liquidity risk, losing money, volatility, uncertainty and the permanent impairment of capital. The list could go on forever.For the tens of millions of baby boomers who have retired or will be retiring in the years ahead, there is another risk that could prove far more important. The biggest threat to the majority of retirees will be outliving t

July 5, 2017

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] Trump and the truth about climate change

Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the ag

July 4, 2017

[Mac Margolis] Brazil needs to look beyond scandal

It’s hard to catch a breath in Brazil. Just the other day President Michel Temer dodged a brick, surviving potentially job-ending charges in electoral court that he’d won his mandate with dirty campaign money. Political bulls promptly declared Temer a survivor who would not only salvage vital political and economic reforms but also tough out his beleaguered presidency.But in a country where two of the last four democratically elected leaders have been ousted in disgrace, and some of the highest-

July 4, 2017