MILAN — Consider two men with the same background: real estate, entertainment, television, conservative politics. Same passions: adulation, flashy mansions, golden furniture, younger women, a perpetual tan, their own hair. Same strengths: cheeky charm, boldness, resilience, the intuition to offer themselves as a provocative alternative to an establishment that treated them as upstarts. Same weakness: […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “Pregnancy Raises Risk of Problems From Virus” (news article, Nov. 3): Eight months into the pandemic, health officials now have conclusive evidence, published in a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that pregnant women are at increased risk of severe illness, or even […]

Voting Donald Trump out of office was crucial, but it will not be enough to save the American experiment. Many critics have used the words “authoritarian” or “fascist” to describe the president’s mode of politics, as if he were an invader from outside our democratic way of life. In fact, Mr. Trump is a creature […]

China’s Fifth Plenum meeting of its communist elite ended as expected last month – after four days of secret meetings in the Chinese capital, out came a communique packed with socialist jargon devoted mainly to the outlines of the country’s future development priorities. But buried also in the 6,000-plus character read-out were the two Chinese […]

The United States’ problems won’t be over when the slow-motion train wreck of the election is finally concluded and, as now seems likely, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. As president, Mr Biden will come to power diminished by the narrowness of his victory over Republican rival Donald […]

Way back in the days after the 2012 election, the last Republican presidential defeat, all the conventional wisdom in American politics converged on a simple idea: The G.O.P. was doomed as a national institution unless it became, in effect, a moderate party of the business class, stiff-arming social conservatives and wooing Hispanic voters by promising […]

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky recently tweeted what seemed to be a striking finding from a randomized study about the use of masks in the pandemic: “To the scolds blaming ⁦@realDonaldTrump infection on not wearing masks: the only published randomized clinical study of cloth masks shows 97% penetration of particles & higher infection rate than […]

(Reuters) – A blank-check company set up by veteran investor Bill Foley is in talks to merge with online payments firm Paysafe Group Ltd, which is backed by Blackstone Group Inc BX.N and CVC Capital Partners, Bloomberg News reported bloom.bg/36co0bb on Friday. The report, citing people with knowledge of the matter, said Foley Trasimene Acquisition […]

Yup, I wanted a grand rebuke, too. I wanted Trump demolished by 10 points. But elections are educational events. Voters are not always wise, but they are usually comprehensible. They know more about their own lives than we in our information bubbles do, and they almost always tell us something important. The first thing we […]

Some years ago, Liu Qin (not her real name), now 51, had a meltdown at a bus station on her way to her village in Anhui province for the Chinese New Year holidays. She started shouting and tearing at her clothes, then blacked out and was taken to hospital. Please subscribe or log in to […]