It sounds like a ghost story: a huge cargo vessel sails up and down the Norwegian coast, silently going about its business, without a captain or crew in sight. But if all goes as planned, it’s actually the future of shipping.Last week, Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, a Norwegian maritime-technology firm, and Yara ASA, a fertilizer manufacturer, announced a partnership to build the world’s first fully autonomous cargo containership. Manned voyages will start in 2018, and in 2020 the Yara Birkeland will se

Think of the intelligence community and its fragile array of secret relationships as a china shop. Think of President Trump as a bull, restless and undisciplined. For months, we’ve been watching the disastrous collision of the two. Trump’s latest self-inflicted spy scandal was the disclosure this week that he had boastfully revealed to Russian visitors his knowledge of highly classified reports about threats by the Islamic State to attack planes with undetectable bombs hidden in laptops. This is

President Donald Trump’s administration has announced a deal with China to open its markets across a range of industries, from beef to financial services. “This is more than has been done in the whole history of US-China relations on trade,” declared Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, with Trumpian modesty.Rhetoric aside, Trump has put China on notice that he intends to target a long list of protectionist economic policies. Given the industries covered, it seems likely that President Barack Obama’s

In Beijing, the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping has held its first-ever international cooperation conference under the theme of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, by which it seeks to establish a huge economic bloc.This scheme was proposed by Xi in the autumn of 2013. The initiative aims to link Asia to Europe by reviving the ancient trade routes of the overland Silk Road and maritime Silk Road as a central pillar of the plan, thereby improving infrastructure in countries along

It is interesting to look at the new situation on the Korean Peninsula and, in particular, America’s relationship with the various parties there -- South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan and even Russia -- in light of the election last week of relatively liberal Moon Jae-in as president of South Korea. He succeeds the more conservative President Park Geun-hye, ousted in March.Moon, the flag-bearer of the Democratic Party, won in a field of 13 candidates, the first liberal to occupy presidency in

President Donald Trump seemed to threaten the former FBI director, James Comey, last week, insinuating -- on Twitter, of course -- that he might release tapes of their conversations at a dinner in the White House and twice over the telephone.　Scary!　A lot pivots on this, of course. Trump says that Comey assured him that he was not a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. News accounts hav

In planning for President Donald Trump’s first trip abroad, White House staffers will be looking for images and achievements that will reinforce the president’s agenda, appeal to him personally, and present him to the world as a global statesman. While in Israel and the Palestinian Authority from May 22-23, there is an easy stop he should make to accomplish all three goals: President Trump should visit Rawabi.Rawabi is the first new, entirely planned Palestinian city in the West Bank, long heral

Pat Moynihan, the great politician-intellectual, warned about the dangers of “defining deviancy down,” in which worse and worse behavior comes to be accepted as the norm.　The late New York senator’s essay, almost a quarter century ago, was about crime and family structure. Today it applies to the Trump presidency: the danger that chronic lying, ignorance of history and policy, petty invective, racial demagoguery and personal greed fall within the realm of the norm.If President Donald Trump gives

At a victory rally for France’s young new President Emmanuel Macron outside the Louvre last week, I was struck by the generational gap between the candidate and his most animated supporters. Most younger people in the crowd looked relieved but far from overjoyed; the most visibly enthusiastic among them were of West African or Arab descent. And when Macron took the stage and began to speak, it was the older heads in the crowd that nodded at his words.I remember, in 2002, watching French students

Pressure should come before talks as NK keeps provoking despite sanctions

The slow pace of US efforts to take Islamic State strongholds Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq have produced a risky US move in relations with NATO ally Turkey.　The US will begin providing heavy weaponry, including armored vehicles, to the Syrian Kurdish group, YPG. Its forces have been fighting alongside US Special Operations troops and other enemies of the Islamic State in Syria in a long effort to take Raqqa. The problem is that Turkey considers the YPG to be a mortal enemy, allied with the P