This summer’s scenes of ragged Central American children and teenagers crammed into makeshift detention centers didn’t exactly affirm Lady Liberty’s invitation to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Rest assured, however, that your well-rested, your rich, your coddled elites face their own difficulties opening the golden door to U.S. citizenship. Exhibit A is the dysfunctional U.S. program that’s meant to grant foreign investors green cards in return for invest

Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister, visited Japan twice during his long decade of ostracism by the West. He is one of only three people that Shinzo Abe follows on Twitter. Commentators have hailed Modi as “India’s Abe” because he seems as determined as the Japanese prime minister to boost national self-esteem through economic growth. Japanese direct investment in India is rising; it may even help realize Modi’s grand, Japan-inspired vision of “smart cities” and bullet trains across India.

NEW YORK ― The reception in the United States, and in other advanced economies, of Thomas Piketty’s recent book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” attests to growing concern about rising inequality. His book lends further weight to the already overwhelming body of evidence concerning the soaring share of income and wealth at the very top.Piketty’s book, moreover, provides a different perspective on the 30 or so years that followed the Great Depression and World War II, viewing this period as

Last month, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman in history to win a Fields Medal ― “math’s Nobel Prize.” This is a cause for celebration, but also for reflection.Things are definitely better than they once were for women in mathematics. In the late 18th century, Sophie Germain, who made significant contributions to number theory despite having no formal schooling, had to use a male pseudonym initially to get the attention of renowned scholars Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Carl Friedrich Gauss,

NEW YORK ― It is time for the United States and other powers to let the Middle East govern itself in line with national sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. As the U.S. contemplates yet another round of military action in Iraq and intervention in Syria, it should recognize two basic truths.First, U.S. interventions, which have cost the country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives over the past decade, have consistently destabilized the Middle East, while causing massive suffering i

The World Health Organization is nothing if not opportunistic, impulsively jumping on every public health issue that makes the front page. And, of course, it always calls for lots more money to throw at the disease-of-the-month. The latest on the WHO’s radar is the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, which has tallied about 1,500 cases. To address it, WHO wants more than $430 million ― from governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions.The plan, outlined in a docu

REYKJAVIK ― Volcanoes and glaciers, fire and ice, are dominant features of this moonscape-pocked island nation. How fitting that over a generation ago the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union came to talk disarmament in the heat of the Cold War.Ballistic missile eruptions and a Soviet-supported Nuclear Freeze movement were all on the table here at Hofði, home of the testy U.S.-Soviet summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. That chilly encounter resulted in disagreeme

In one of the more famous scenes in “Top Gun,” Tom Cruise buzzes a Soviet MiG, upside down, and flips its Commie pilot the bird. This is hardly how the Cold War rivals confronted each other in real life, of course. As it demands the respect due a new great power, China would do well to remember that. According to the Pentagon, since this past spring fighters from a Chinese squadron based on Hainan Island have repeatedly harassed U.S. military planes conducting surveillance outside China’s territ

As China struggles to bring Hong Kong to heel, it suddenly has another problem child on its hands: Macau, the tiny island-state on China’s south coast that serves as Asia’s Las Vegas.Workers have taken to the streets of China’s other Special Administrative Region seven times this year, demanding higher salaries and better working conditions. Activists have sponsored an unofficial referendum asking Macanese if they support universal suffrage by 2019. Poll organizers, several of whom were temporar