Americans want their cyber data to be safe from prying eyes. They also want the government to be able to catch criminals. Can they have both?　It’s an especially pertinent question to ask at a time when concerns over Russian hacking are prevalent. Can we expose lawbreakers without also putting law-abiders at greater risk? After all, the same iPhone that makes life easier for ordinary Americans also makes life easier for criminals.　Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has described the oper

Remember March, when Democrats were in a swivet over President Trump’s budget proposal -- the one that threatened to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, eliminate funding for public broadcasting and the arts, and use the money for a border wall?　Never mind. The spending bill Congress produced this week cuts the EPA by all of 1 percent, increases spending on the arts by $2 million and prohibits any spending on a wall. It was -- gasp! -- an old-fashioned bipartisan compromise, with Republican

According to President Donald Trump, he had decided to pull out of NAFTA until, at the last minute the other day, he talked with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, who convinced him to first try renegotiating the 23-year-old trade agreement with them instead.　According to other sources, Trump’s economic team showed him the actual numbers involved in the existing trade among the three nations. And the businessman who cast himself as a godlike job creator saw a real danger in simply walking. Let’s

Last week, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft went where nothing made by humans had ever gone before -- it successfully navigated a path between Saturn and its rings and survived. Cassini also beamed back pictures and other essential data as it maneuvered the 2,414-kilometer-wide space between the solar system’s second-largest planet and its icy rings.　The images, which take 78 minutes to make the 1.6 million-kilometer trip back to Earth, reveal a blazing, mysterious process of alternating light and dark

The likely victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election has elicited a global sigh of relief. At least Europe is not going down the protectionist path that President Donald Trump is forcing the United States to take.But advocates of globalization should keep the champagne on ice: protectionists and advocates of “illiberal democracy” are on the rise in many other countries. And the fact that an open bigot and habitual liar could get as many votes as Trump did in the US, and that

In a topsy-turvy world, yesterday’s enemy can be today’s friend. The US has played this game (Germany, Japan, Italy, Vietnam and so forth). For another remarkable reversal of enmity and alliance, let’s drop in on the Kremlin.In 1989, the Soviet Union limped out of Afghanistan, defeated by ragtag mujahedeen fighters determined to turn back Moscow’s bid to commandeer their homeland. Those mujahedeen forces evolved into the Afghan Taliban, ousted from power by America’s post-9/11 invasion of Afghan

“I was one very lucky kid,” wrote retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in a 2016 memoir about his bumpy childhood in a working-class Rhode Island family. “I was one of those nasty tough kids, hell-bent on breaking rules for the adrenaline rush and hardwired just enough to not care about the consequences.”　Flynn described how he was arrested but given probation after “some serious and unlawful activity.” But he added, “I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act

North Korea presents what is perhaps America’s most dangerous and urgent dilemma at the moment. So what should the Trump administration do?Here is the problem. The Pyongyang regime of leader Kim Jong-un, pretty much a one-trick pony with that steed being its nuclear weapon-missile program, has proved itself over the years to be very hard to deal with. Six-party talks, including South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, haven’t worked. Various palliative, conciliatory

The Asia-Pacific region’s high and steady economic growth has been an anchor of stability for the struggling world economy in recent years. Developing economies of the region now account for almost a third of global GDP, slightly less than the combined output of the developed economies of North America and Western Europe. If the region continues to grow at the current pace, it would account for more than a half of world economic output by the year 2050. With its increasing importance, the role o

Smokestacks and tailpipes may be the biggest and most obvious sources of greenhouse gases, but they’re not the only ones to worry about. An invisible, underappreciated one is right in America’s front yards: leaking pipes that carry natural gas into people’s homes.The good news is that scientists have devised a clever way to find these leaks, by attaching methane detectors to car bumpers -- they’ve used Google’s “Street View” photography cars -- and driving along the city streets. It’s a strategy