Donald Trump is trying to take on the single most globalized industry -- and China. But the world’s largest car market won’t budge.　Beijing reduced duties on autos July 1, just before the imposition Friday of US tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods. China’s carmakers, like its consumers, are the least vulnerable to external forces compared with counterparts elsewhere. The tariffs with which Trump is intimidating the auto industry will, on the other hand, wipe out a swath of bottom lines, burn

It will be months before a verdict is reached in the corruption case brought against ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is accused of siphoning money from a former unit of the state-owned 1MDB development fund. (He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.) But his arrest this week is more significant than many people outside the region may realize. It’s the first sign of something that modern Southeast Asia has till now lacked — accountability for the region’s top leaders.　 Since gaining

There’s a dog that hasn’t barked in the current round of trade tensions between the US and China: Despite the first direct tariffs coming into force Friday, the Chinese consumer has been on her best behavior.　That’s somewhat unusual if you consider Beijing’s most recent diplomatic spats with its trading partners.　 When relations with South Korea deteriorated last year over Seoul’s decision to deploy a missile shield, Chinese civil society went straight for the jugular.　Yang Bingyang, a former mo

In the feverish run-up to conflict, it’s only natural the protagonists should be on the hunt for ways to justify their rash actions.　In the months preceding the 2003 Iraq war, that came in the form of the confected claims that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and trained al-Qaida operatives in how to use them.　 With a fresh set of tariff barriers this week set to ramp up tensions between China and the US, it’s now coming in a different form: A narrative that compromise with Beijin

Every French leader since the 1980s has been elected on a mandate to fight unemployment -- and failed. Whatever else he accomplishes, getting people into work is the one thing French President Emmanuel Macron will be judged on at the end of his term.　The Macron plan is basically a wish list of reforms that France’s senior technocratic elite has urged on its politicians for decades. The agenda involves a little bit of labor market deregulation and slight cuts to France’s extraordinarily high wage

If Amazon’s move to disrupt health care is going to make Americans any healthier, the improvement is most likely to take place in the business of getting prescription drugs to patients more reliably. For one thing, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Failure to take prescription drugs kills about 125,000 Americans a year, according to a recent review in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and this form of noncompliance costs the health care system $100 billion to $289 billion a year.　 PillPack