The last message that now former Interpol President Meng Hongwei sent to his wife was an emoji depicting a knife. Soon after, he disappeared into China’s feared and opaque Ministry of Public Security, the subject of a corruption investigation about which no details have been revealed. The disappearance is a blow to Meng’s family, Interpol and China’s aspirations to lead similar international organizations in the future.That’s bad enough. But the impact of China’s power play will be even more far

Prepare for a crackdown on China’s overheated rental market.President Xi Jinping’s push to develop housing for lease was supposed to take the edge off soaring home prices. It hasn’t worked out that way. Rents instead have rocketed as the government’s call triggered a stampede of investment into the sector, fueling discontent among a millennial population that had already been priced out of the market for home purchases.Chengdu led the surge with a 31 percent jump in average rents in the year thr

US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will become the latest senior foreign policy official to leave the Donald Trump administration, following former National Security Advisers Mike Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, top economic adviser Gary Cohn, and others. More will likely head for the exits in the wake of the midterm elections in November.Haley’s departure, scheduled for the end of the year, will have two major repercussions on US foreign policy, one short

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and writer for the Washington Post, is the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations in years. While the Trump administration is resistant, unless the emerging narrative about what happened changes, a clear American response will be inevitable and warranted.But we need to be clear about what we want and why we want it, and to accept our own responsibility for the international climate in which this has occurred.Everyone agrees that

Japan Inc. is getting its groove back. An overlooked policy change could be a driver.In recent months, Japanese companies have been posting a wave of positive data. Machinery orders -- a key indicator of companies’ capital spending in the future -- rose 12.6 percent on the year in August to the highest level in a decade, data Wednesday showed, much faster than forecast. Several analysts had expected orders to fall.Meanwhile, corporate investment shot up last quarter to the fastest pace in over a

In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Oct. 15, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard’s admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege” because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipula

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary-general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. “Interpol’s General Secretariat looks forward to an official respons

George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a British newspaper in the mid-1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same insistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at the Washington Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.I have known

President Donald Trump’s trade war is less bad than it was just a short time ago. After some tense negotiations, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been replaced with a new, very similar arrangement, meaning the disruption to trade -- and to US relations with Canada and Mexico -- will be contained. The agreement might even ease the damage from the president’s misguided steel and aluminum tariffs. Trump has also turned his attention away from Europe, avoiding the mistake of getting into

The “America First” policy President Donald Trump extolls “has won,” scholar Robert Kagan wrote in a recent op-ed, surmising that the administration’s preference for unilateralism, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions amount to “a new direction of American foreign policy.”But there is reason to believe victory will be fleeting. In time, this period may be recognized more as the high water mark of a short-lived turn toward quasi-isolationism than the beginning of an enduring trend.To