With this week’s 50th anniversary of North Korea’s illegal seizure of the USS Pueblo on Jan. 23, 1968, and the capture of the crew, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how news reporting has changed over the ensuing decades. At the time, coverage in the papers and on television was sober and thoughtful. Items buried deep inside the stories would be headlines today, when informing the public is often less important than winning clicks and eyeballs.Consider a few examples. North Korean patrol b

When I was growing up, the idea of re-engineering human DNA was a staple of science fiction. Now, it’s a reality. Adult gene therapy -- editing the genome of a person -- is expected to soon be a treatment option for a number of otherwise intractable diseases. Meanwhile, scientists have successfully edited the DNA of human embryos, raising the possibility that parents might be able to modify their children’s genomes to save them from inherited diseases.　Much of the change from science fiction to

The liberal world order, insofar as it still exists, is about rules and conditionality: If you stay on the righteous path, you’ll get help. On Tuesday, former US Vice President Joe Biden explained how this worked for Ukraine while he was the Obama administration’s point man on the rebellious post-Soviet nation. The reminiscences should serve as a cautionary tale for International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who met Wednesday with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Davos to discus

The choreography could not have been better this week. The leaders of the eurozone’s three largest economies took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos one after the other to deliver the same message. In the era of Donald Trump’s “America First,” the leaders of Italy, Germany and France all spoke up to oppose protectionism and embrace multilateralism.Cooperation will start at home, they pledged: the euro area will strive to forge closer ties starting this year. As French President Emman

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc. said it will use its own capital to reimburse customers who lost money in Friday’s $400 million theft.The Tokyo-based company will repay all 260,000 users impacted by the theft of NEM coins, at a rate of 88.549 yen (82 U.S. cents) for each coin, according to a statement posted on its website after midnight local time on Sunday. A total of 523 million coins were stolen, it said.“The timing of the reimbursement and the application process

Rent control is one of the first policies that students traditionally learn about in undergraduate economics classes. The idea is to get young people thinking about how policies intended to help the poor can backfire and hurt them instead. According to the basic theory of supply and demand, rent control causes housing shortages that reduce the number of low-income people who can live in a city. Even worse, rent control will tend to raise demand for housing -- and therefore, rents -- in other are

For anyone who thinks it’s a major diplomatic breakthrough to have the two Koreas march under one flag at the Winter Olympics and field a joint women’s’ ice hockey team … well, I have a DMZ to sell you.　Yes, next month’s opening ceremony will mark the first sporting event in a decade where the two sides have entered under one banner. But they’ve done it eight times before. And they’ve fielded joint teams twice before.The last time was in 1991: That brief shining moment was followed by, among oth

Last Sunday’s sinking of an Iranian oil tanker 180 miles off the coast of Shanghai certainly looks like an environmental disaster. Depending on how many of the ship’s 1 million barrels of condensate were released into the ocean and not burned off, the accident could end up being one of the biggest oil spills in half a century. The irony? Even that wouldn’t represent the biggest disaster to befall the area.　The fact is, thanks to massive overfishing in China’s territorial waters, there isn’t much

The many critics of Freedom House can finally gloat: The think tank has turned its well-calibrated guns on the US in its 2018 report on “Freedom in the World”:　“The past year brought further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory, damaging its international credibility as a champion of good governance and human rights.”　America’s “core institutions,” the think tank continues, “were attacked by an administration that rejects established norms of eth

Can an international deal ever really be final? President Donald Trump seems to think the answer is no, given his penchant for withdrawing from agreements made under President Barack Obama -- the Paris climate change accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade and (maybe) the Iranian nuclear deal.　But what about international agreements that actually declare themselves to be irreversible? That’s the case with the 2015 Japan-South Korea deal that was aimed at ending once and for all the confl

For those vulnerable to displays of pageantry and pacifism, the news from the Koreas this week must have been alluring. At a moment when North Korea’s dictator is threatening the world with hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles, the North and the South agreed to march together in the Olympic ceremonies next month under a common flag.　Well, I have some bad news for the dreamers. Now is not the time to give peace a chance.　The gambit from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is transparent to anyon

Last Sunday’s sinking of an Iranian oil tanker 180 miles off the coast of Shanghai certainly looks like an environmental disaster. Depending on how many of the ship’s 1 million barrels of condensate were released into the ocean and not burned off, the accident could end up being one of the biggest oil spills in half a century. The irony? Even that wouldn’t represent the biggest disaster to befall the area.　The fact is, thanks to massive overfishing in China’s territorial waters, there isn’t much

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel is worried once again that President Donald Trump will blow up the Iran nuclear deal.　It’s not just that the Europeans assert that Iran is complying with the terms of the 2015 accord. It’s also that Gabriel believes exiting the agreement would send the wrong message to North Korea. “It’s absolutely necessary to have the signal that it’s possible by diplomatic approaches to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in a time when other parts of the world ar

Italy’s politicians often stand accused of lacking the courage needed to shake up the country’s ailing economy. What if, however, the issue was Italian voters, who don’t want a reformist government? 　This question springs to mind watching the depressing campaign ahead of Italy’s general elections, which will be held on March 4. Italians look increasingly set on going back to the future, supporting the 81-year old media tycoon and convicted felon Silvio Berlusconi, a four-time former Italian prim

Nigel Farage, that most notorious of Brexit agitators, hasn’t made any friends by suggesting that the UK should “maybe, just maybe” have a second referendum on EU membership. Fellow nationalists, the Conservative government, the opposition Labour Party -- no one seems to want a replay of the 2016 vote. But even if Farage is just fishing for attention, he’s essentially right. Here’s a sports analogy the Brits might want to consider.In 1999, Arsenal was the second-strongest team in England’s Premi

For more than 100 years, the Middle East has been defined by oil exploration, production and its boundaries. Now the region is getting repurposed by its aspiration to grow beyond fossil fuel. The shake-up in Saudi Arabia’s royal family was as much about becoming a 21st-century economy as it was about rooting out corruption.　None of the region’s petrostates has moved further from its oilfield roots than Dubai, which has been diversifying its economy since the 1970s. The result is a thriving gatew

“Walmart workers” used to be a handy synonym for “low-paid.” But over the past few years, the company has steadily raised the wage it offers its lowest-paid employees, and it has now announced that base pay will go up again, to $11 an hour.　Actually, there are a lot of reasons to care about this. The first is that this tells us interesting things about what’s going on in the labor market. While CEO Doug McMillon credited the new Republican tax bill with freeing up cash the company could use to p

Despite growing hostility between Russia and the West, President Vladimir Putin clearly hasn’t succeeded in convincing the Russian business community that it should be more patriotic. The list of new citizens of Malta, published by the island nation’s government, has enough well-known Russian names to drive home an uncomfortable truth for the Kremlin: The Russian elite doesn’t feel attached to Putin’s besieged fortress project.Malta’s so-called Individual Investor Program allows a nonresident fo

Mauricio Macri had a pretty good year. Having settled a sulfurous quarrel over past-due debts with cranky hedge funds, the Argentine president went on to dismantle market-warping energy subsidies, rehabilitate the census bureau, slow inflation, and thwart a Peronist revolt to lead his fledgling Cambiemos political coalition to a major victory in the October midterm elections. Then, just before Christmas, he persuaded Congress to roll back corporate taxes and even tweak old age pensions, the gran

As the crypto mania continues to spread into financial markets, now at “real companies” like Eastman Kodak and Seagate Technology, policymakers are going to grow more concerned about broader implications for financial markets and the real economy.　Is cryptocurrency exuberance a sign of financial market froth more broadly? If so, that could trigger concerns about financial stability and justify an accelerating pace of rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. But rather than that knee-jerk response, t