China’s central bank cut interest rates and made it easier on Wednesday for banks to increase lending and pump more money into the economy, in the most significant policy steps taken by Chinese officials to limit the impact of the trade war with the United States. The central bank, the People’s Bank of China, cut … Read more
Two decades ago, before Friedrich Merz came back from the private sector to win the German chancellorship, he accepted an invitation to a gathering of the French Foreign Legion in Corsica. At the last moment, the organizers asked him to arrive on the parade ground not by road or rail, but by parachute. Mr. Merz, … Read more
The Conversation has been a staple of The Times’s Opinion pages since 2017. But after eight years, the weekly dialogue between the liberal columnist Gail Collins and her conservative colleague Bret Stephens has come to an end. The editor Aaron Retica joins Gail and Bret to answer reader questions and discuss how they’ve managed years … Read more
Voters in Australia were casting their ballots in a general election on Saturday, the third major U.S. ally after Germany and Canada to vote in a global economic and political landscape upended by the second Trump administration. The two men vying to lead Australia — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, of the center-left Labor Party, and … Read more
Nigel Farage’s insurgent anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., scored a significant, if narrow, victory Friday in a parliamentary special election in the northwest of England, serving notice that Mr. Farage, a populist fixture and close ally of President Trump, is again a rising force in British politics. Reform’s candidate, Sarah Pochin, won by a razor-thin margin … Read more
When Jonathan Neman was a student at Georgetown in the mid-2000s, he and some friends wanted to start a restaurant. A fast-food restaurant, but it would be healthy. And cool. The documentary “Super Size Me” had made waves, and “we were going to be rejecting the fast food of the previous generation,” Mr. Neman said. … Read more
Pennsylvania state authorities have arrested a 38-year-old Harrisburg man they said set fire to the governor’s mansion while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept, forcing them to evacuate early Sunday before the blaze severely damaged part of the building. The man, identified as Cody Balmer, 38, jumped a fence and managed to evade state … Read more
Britain has watched President Trump’s tariffs with a mix of shock, fascination and queasy recognition. The country, after all, embarked on a similar experiment in economic isolationism when it voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Nearly nine years after the Brexit referendum, it is still reckoning with the costs. The lessons of that … Read more
There aren’t a lot of countries Israel’s prime minister can visit without risking arrest. Which makes the red-carpet treatment Benjamin Netanyahu received in Hungary — Europe’s only proud “illiberal democracy” — all the more noteworthy. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, invited Mr. Netanyahu right after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last November … Read more
South Korea’s Constitutional Court on Friday upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol, removing him from office four months after his short-lived imposition of martial law on Dec. 3. Protesters who have been demanding his ouster erupted in cheers at the ruling, waving flags and pumping their fists in the air. For weeks leading … Read more