For students of incomprehensible behavior by otherwise apparently intelligent leaders, Australian politics is the gift that keeps on giving. The latest example is the decision by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government, just re-elected by a razor-thin margin, to deny former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd the formal nomination he needed to join the race to be the next U.N. sec...

Spoiler alert, the Republicans went ahead and actually nominated Donald Trump. The theme of the night was “Make America An Adjective Or Verb Again,” and the highlight speaker was Chris Christie, who had the crowd on its feet when he presented DNA evidence linking Hillary Clinton to a 17-state string of bank robberies. The evening ended on an inspirational note with Melania Trump leading the deleg...

An Arbitral Tribunal under Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) made its final decision (with the secretarial assistance of the Permanent Court of Arbitration) on 12 July 2016 concerning the South China Sea dispute between the Philippines and China. The Philippines unilaterally addressed its written notification to China under the Annex VII arbitral proce...

This was never supposed to happen. Three years ago, when U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron promised his country a referendum on remaining a member of the European Union, he was sure of victory. The country had other ideas. On Thursday Britain voted to quit. It’s a momentous choice -- and not in a good way. The immediate risk to Britain’s economy is grave, because the vote creates enormous uncert...

The U.K. has voted for the “most expensive divorce proceeding in the history of the world,” in the words of U.S. billionaire Wilbur Ross, with BBC projections showing voters backed “Leave” by 52 percent to 48 percent. The challenge facing both Britain and its newly ditched European partners now is to ensure that the separation doesn’t deteriorate into acrimony and revenge. The EU should regar...

The shooting of Harambe the gorilla to save a 3-year-old boy who’d fallen into an enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo whipped the Internet into a frenzy. The boy’s mother has been branded a terrible parent and authorities are investigating the incident and the zoo. We’re not here to referee Web flaming or to second-guess zookeepers’ actions. Let’s turn the scope around and examine a deeper — and hea...

There is an important, but quiet debate in the economics profession about what leads to big recessions: wealth or debt. Almost everyone agrees, at this point, that the Great Recession of 2007-09 was caused by the financial system. But that leaves the question of what, exactly, happens in a financial system that leads an economy to crash. Formal economic models of financial shocks are not very re...

The leftists who came of age in the counterculture revolutionary movements of the ’60s and ’70s are now in charge in both Europe and the U.S., and facing a populist backlash. They failed to learn the lessons of their own experiences, and it’s time for them to be dropkicked into the waste bin of history. In the wake of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was a massive movement in W...

Democrats hoped this presidential election would be a cakewalk. In their eyes, the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, spent most of the spring alienating big chunks of the electorate, beginning with women. Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, has run a careful, well-funded, well-honed campaign. What could go wrong? And yet, in a spate of reputable surveys ...

Which country has the highest percentage of its Muslim population fighting for the Islamic State group as foreign recruits? Algeria? Afghanistan? Indonesia? Nope. Try Finland. No. 2 is Ireland, followed by Belgium, Sweden and Austria. What do these countries have in common, besides being European? They’re wealthy, democratic and have high levels of education, health and income. They also have v...