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What may be most critical to understand is how these rumors get fed at multiple levels.

Jones is a complete lunatic, but he is also a favorite of the President-elect of the United States. Trump has appeared on his show and praised him effusively.

The notion quickly moved to other social-media platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts

“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”

First, you have the denizens of forum websites who trade information and speculation, whipping each other into a frenzy and coordinating their efforts to push these insane tales as widely as possible. They’re then promoted by people with larger platforms like the conspiratorial radio host Alex Jones:

Jones’ ravings and similar conspiracy theories are routinely passed along by people around the President-elect, including his sons and his choice for national security adviser.

This three-level structure is what enables the most ridiculous false stories to spread: an internet network for individual citizens to devise the story and communicate; media figures like Jones who widen the reach of the story; and then influential people like Michael Flynn or even Donald Trump himself to validate it.

With a president who will be regularly propagating crazed conspiracy theories and singling out individual citizens as targets of his displeasure, it’s only a matter of time before another of his well-armed supporters decides to take matters into their own hands, and this time finishes the job.

The battle over Falluja has evolved into yet another example of how United States and Iranian interests seemingly converge and clash at the same time in Iraq. Both want to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS

Militiamen have plastered artillery shells with the name of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a Shiite cleric close to Iran whose execution this year by Saudi Arabia, a Sunni power, deepened the region’s sectarian divide, before firing them at Falluja.

But in Iraq, where the United States backs the central government, and trains and advises the Iraqi Army, it has been limited by the role of Iran, the most powerful foreign power inside the country.

In an extraordinary statement on Wednesday, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the world’s pre-eminent Shiite religious leader, who lives in Najaf in southern Iraq and is said to be concerned by Iran’s growing role in Iraq, urged security forces and militia to restrain themselves and abide by “the standard behaviors of jihad.”

The United States has thousands of military personnel in Iraq and has trained Iraqi security forces for nearly two years, yet is largely on the sidelines in the battle to retake Falluja. It says its air and artillery strikes have killed dozens of Islamic State fighters, including the group’s Falluja commander.

In Syria, where the government of Bashar al-Assad is an enemy, America’s ally is the Kurds.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has stressed that civilians must be protected in the operation and ordered that humanitarian corridors be opened to allow civilians to leave the city safely, disavowed the militia leader’s comments.

She said that some residents had been killed for refusing to fight for the jihadists, and that those inside were surviving on old stacks of rice, a few dates and water from unsafe sources such as drainage ditches.

To allay fears that the battle for Falluja will heighten sectarian tensions, Iraqi officials, including Mr. Abadi, and militia leaders have said they will adhere to a battle plan that calls for the militias not to participate in the assault on the city.

The American military role in Iraq has been limited mostly to airstrikes and the training of the army. But, as in northern Syria, there are also Special Forces soldiers in Iraq, carrying out raids on Islamic State targets.

Iraq’s elite counterterror forces are preparing to lead the assault on Falluja; they have long worked closely with the United States and are considered among the few forces loyal to the country and not to a sect.

A big question going into the battle is whether the Islamic State fighters will dig in and fight or, as they have in some other battles, throw away their weapons and try to melt into the civilian population.

For the United States, there is also the matter of history: Led by the Marines, its forces fought two bloody battles for Falluja in 2004. Mindful of this past, American officials would have preferred that the Iraqis left Falluja alone for now and focused on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul in the north.

The American military’s assault on Falluja in April of 2004 was in retaliation for an episode that became an early symbol of a war spiraling out of control, the image of it as indelible as it was gruesome: the bodies of four Blackwater contractors dangling from the ironwork of a bridge.

believed that Iran’s role, which relies on militias accused of sectarian abuses, can make matters worse by angering Sunnis and making them more sympathetic to the militants.

In Syria, where the government of Bashar al-Assad is an enemy, America’s ally is the Kurds.

in Iraq, where the United States backs the central government, and trains and advises the Iraqi Army, it has been limited by the role of Iran, the most powerful foreign power inside the country.

“There are no patriots, no real religious people in Falluja. It’s our chance to clear Iraq by eradicating the cancer of Falluja.”

The United States has thousands of military personnel in Iraq and has trained Iraqi security forces for nearly two years, yet is largely on the sidelines in the battle to retake Falluja.

A Shiite militia leader, in a widely circulated video, is seen rallying his men with a message of revenge against the people of Falluja, whom many Iraqi Shiites believe to be Islamic State sympathizers rather than innocent civilians.

“Falluja is a terrorism stronghold

It’s been the stronghold since 2004 until today.”

restrain themselves and abide by “the standard behaviors of jihad.”

“The Prophet Muhammad used to tell his companions before sending them to fight, to go forward in the name of Allah, with Allah and upon the religion of the messenger of Allah. Do not kill the elderly, children or women, do not steal the spoils but collect them, and do not cut down trees unless you are forced to do so.”

“saving an innocent human being from dangers around him is much more important than targeting and eliminating the enemy.”

If the militias do hold back as promised, then the United States is likely to step up the tempo of the air campaign

The American military role in Iraq has been limited mostly to airstrikes and the training of the army.

In northern Iraq, where they work with Kurdish forces, two American Special Forces soldiers have been killed.

The United States military estimates that between 500 and 1,000 Islamic State fighters remain in Falluja,

A big question going into the battle is whether the Islamic State fighters will dig in and fight or, as they have in some other battles, throw away their weapons and try to melt into the civilian population.

Led by the Marines, its forces fought two bloody battles for Falluja in 2004. Mindful of this past, American officials would have preferred that the Iraqis left Falluja alone for now and focused on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul in the north.

Where is the Republican red line when it comes to Trump? It is too early to determine, but not too early to consider. Trump’s theory of governing, as it develops, could be a direct and serious challenge to American institutions.

On the issues that seem to matter most to Trump — immigration and trade — America’s chief executive has extraordinary powers. He can end trade agreements and impose tariffs unilaterally. He can impose immigration changes up to limits that he is not even approaching.

We are discovering how many presidential limits are rooted in respect for norms rather than obedience to laws.

After two weeks, we can be certain of two things: To Trump, norms mean nothing. To America, they matter greatly.

the company has been noticeably silent on viruses perpetrated in its own backyard, where Russian-speaking criminal syndicates controlled a third of the estimated $12 billion global cybercrime market last year, according to the Russian security firm Group-IB. Some say there is good reason. “He’s got family,” said Sean Sullivan, an adviser at F-Secure, a computer security firm in Helsinki. “I wouldn’t expect them to be the most aggressive about publicizing threats in their neighborhood for fear those neighbors would retaliate.”

Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)

Things didn’t turn out well for our economy or our society. As millions lost their homes during and after the crisis, median wealth declined nearly 40 percent in three years. Banks would have done badly, too, were it not for the Bush-Obama mega-bailouts.

This cascade of trust destruction was unrelenting. One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank

bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate. But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted.

THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.

So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value

Similarly, teachers must be given incentive pay to induce them to exert themselves. But teachers already work hard for low wages because they are dedicated to improving the lives of their students. Do we really believe that giving them $50 more, or even $500 more, as incentive pay will induce them to work harder? What we should do is increase teacher salaries generally because we recognize the value of their contributions and trust in their professionalism. According to the advocates of an incentive-based culture, though, this would be akin to giving something for nothing.

Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.

This is not just a coldhearted vision of human nature. It is also implausible. It is simply impossible to pay for trust every time it is required. Without trust, life would be absurdly expensive; good information would be nearly unobtainable; fraud would be even more rampant than it is; and transaction and litigation costs would soar.

When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income — and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery — some pretty basic things are at stake. Reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.

Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along.

a deeper rot takes hold: Attitudes and norms begin to change. When no one is trustworthy, it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. Perhaps this is the only way for some to reconcile their worldview with their outlandish financial success, often achieved through actions that reveal a kind of moral deprivation.

As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis.

The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money — and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab

But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.

I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.

Scalia declared that “a person who is required to put his name to a document is much less likely to lie than one who can lie anonymously.”Scalia concluded: “I can imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity.”

Propriety of scale in all human undertakings is paramount, and we ignore it. We are now betting our lives on quantities that far exceed all our powers of comprehension. We believe that we have built a perhaps limitless power of comprehension into computers and other machines, but our minds remain as limited as ever. Our trust that machines can manipulate to humane effect quantities that are unintelligible and unimaginable to humans is incorrigibly strange.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits. This brings us to an entirely practical question:  Can we—and, if we can, how can we—make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent things we say we know? This obviously cannot be accomplished by a technological breakthrough, nor can it be accomplished by a big thought. Perhaps it cannot be accomplished at all.

The region has experienced frequent deadly clashes in recent years.

AFP news agency quotes officials as saying more than 4,000 police officers and soldiers have been killed in the past three decades in fighting with traffickers.

Artillery exchanges in the disputed waters are not unprecedented, but rising military tensions there indicated that after months of relative calm, hostilities between the two Koreas have begun ratcheting up again. They raised fears that the often-repeated cycle of peace overtures followed by military provocations was resuming on the Korean Peninsula.“Pyongyang prefers to strike when it sees Washington as weak or distracted, beset by bigger problems,” Lee Sung-yoon, a North Korea expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said, referring to the North’s capital.

Citing the joint military exercises Washington and Seoul started in late February as a provocation, North Korea has test-fired a series of rockets and short- and midrange ballistic missiles in recent weeks. The tests prompted the United Nations Security Council to warn last week of new action against the country, which is already under heavy sanctions.

The two parties in the Korean War never agreed on a western sea border when the three-year conflict ended in a cease-fire in 1953. South Korea tries to defend the so-called northern limit line, which was unilaterally declared by the United Nations. North Korea does not recognize it, claiming another demarcation line farther south.

The waters were the scene of several naval skirmishes in recent years. In 2010, North Korea fired hundreds of artillery rounds into disputed waters, some of them falling south of the northern limit line. Later that year, it shelled one of the South Korean border islands, killing four people and prompting the South to retaliate with its own barrage against North Korean gun positions.

Kim Jong-un, who came to power after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011, has so far “turned out to be more of a hard-liner and far more bellicose in external relations than his father,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a

There was no sign of an imminent nuclear test from North Korea, but the South Korean military was operating an emergency response system to promptly handle North Korean provocations, the South Korean defense ministry said.

The Belgian counterterrorism official said indications of ISIS ordering attacks in Europe mark an apparent significant shift by the terrorist group. Before the air campaign against it, the official said, there was little indication ISIS leaders were directly plotting attacks in the West. Instead, the group prioritized its project to create an Islamic caliphate.

Mr. Obama’s decision to accuse North Korea of ordering the largest destructive attack against an American target — and to promise retaliation, which has begun in the form of new economic sanctions — was highly unusual: The United States had never explicitly charged another government with mounting a cyberattack on American targets.

Lebanese intelligence believes the bombers could be part of a cell dispatched to Beirut by ISIS leadership, the source said, but investigators are still working to verify the surviving suspect's claim

Last month at least 95 people were killed in twin bombings in Turkey's capital, Ankara, ripping through a peace rally near the city's main train station

The attack may have been retaliation for a recent change in Turkey's stance toward confronting the ISIS threat -- shortly before the attacks it had allowed the U.S. to launch strikes on ISIS from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

Russia's recent, increased involvement in the fight against ISIS has seemingly escalated the terror group's responses.

Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, in which all 224 people on board were killed, the recent attacks in Lebanon and France suggest that the jihadists are lashing out.

A revelation Sunday that at least one of the Paris terrorists who killed more than 120 people on Friday entered Europe under cover as a refugee appears likely to fire up the security debate over what to do with them

Eventually, he made his way to Paris, where he was one of three men who blew themselves up at the Stade de France.

Seven people have been arrested in relation to the attacks in the raids, he said.

The authorities there have been making headway, however. At the beginning of the year a terror cell on the brink of carrying out an attack was the target of a raid which left two suspects dead and a third injured and apprehended.

Abu Nabil, an Iraqi national and longtime al Qaeda operative, was taken out in an airstrike authorized and initiated prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday night, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

he infamous masked British executioner, who has apparently appeared in a number of gruesome videos in which ISIS captives were decapitated, was very likely killed in a drone strike earlier in the month.

Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of this weekend's G20 summit in Turkey and reportedly reached an informal agreement that there was a necessity for a ceasefire and transitional government in Syria to effectively combat the threat.

The U.N. working group is believed to have decided that Assange is being unlawfully detained, according to the Press Association, a British news organization. The decision is scheduled to be published Friday.

Whatever the U.N. group decides, it won't affect how Swedish authorities look at Assange's case. Nor will it necessarily affect what police in London will do.

The Swedes issued an arrest warrant for Assange on sex crime allegations unrelated to WikiLeaks in 2010. Assange was in London at the time, and as he fought to have the warrant dismissed, Ecuador granted him political asylum. He's been living in the embassy since June 2012.

The Swedish prosecutors' statement noted a May 2015 court ruling that Assange "should still be detained" and that Ecuadorian officials haven't allowed Swedish authorities to interview him.

London police ended their 24-hour guard of the Ecuadorian Embassy in October, saying it was no longer "proportionate."

Assange said he submitted a complaint to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention about his case in 2014. Justice For Assange, a site set up to fight for his release, said the panel is expected to rule this week on whether Assange's detention arbitrarily deprived him of his liberty -- in other words, whether it is illegal.

But Assange added that if the panel ruled in his favor, "I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me."The Australian has not been charged and has denied the rape claim. He says it is retaliation for WikiLeaks having released thousands of pages of government secrets.He has said he fears Sweden would extradite him to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing those documents.

In his appeal to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange said his confinement has deprived him of access to fresh air, sunlight and adequate medical care. He says he is subject to round-the-clock surveillance and remains in a constant state of insecurity.

In other instances of detention, the U.N. working group called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar after years of house arrest. The group has also ruled for the release of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, but he remains in prison.

Within hours, Turkish warplanes bombed bases in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and which Davutoglu accused of collaborating in the car bombing.

Turkey's armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, Davutoglu said, promising that those responsible would "pay the price".

President Tayyip Erdogan also said initial findings suggested the Syrian Kurdish militia and the PKK were behind the bombing and said that 14 people had been detained.

The co-leader of the YPG's political wing denied that the affiliated YPG perpetrated the Ankara bombing and said Turkey was using the attack to justify an escalation in fighting in northern Syria.

The attack was the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State militants.

Turkey is getting dragged ever deeper into the war in neighboring Syria and is trying to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast.

The YPG militia, regarded by Ankara as a hostile insurgent force deeply linked to the PKK, has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.

Hundreds of Syrian rebels with weapons and vehicles have re-entered Syria from Turkey over the last week to reinforce insurgents fending off the Kurdish-led assault on Azaz, rebel sources said on Thursday.

The political arm of the YPG, denied involvement in the bombing, while a senior member of the PKK said he did not know who was responsible.

Turkey has said its shelling of YPG positions is a response, within its rules of engagement, to hostile fire coming across the border into Turkey, something Muslim also denied.

Turkey has been battling PKK militants in its own southeast, where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July and pitched the region into its worst bloodshed since the 1990s. Six soldiers were killed and one wounded on Thursday when a remote-controlled handmade bomb hit their vehicle, the military said.

Davutoglu named the suicide bomber as Salih Necar, born in 1992 and from the Hasakah region of northern Syria, and said he was a member of the YPG.

A senior security official said the alleged bomber had entered Turkey from Syria in July 2014, although he may have crossed the border illegally multiple times before that, and said he had contact with the PKK and Syrian intelligence.

Davutoglu also accused the Syrian government of a hand in the Ankara bombing and warned Russia, whose air strikes in northern Syria have helped the YPG to advance, against using the Kurdish militant group against Turkey.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told a teleconference with reporters that the Kremlin condemned the bombing "in the strongest possible terms".

Before the question could even be asked, Yousef explained that “the last suicide bombing used by Hamas was in 2004,” saying that the technique of indiscriminate killing was harming the movement.

“For years, they were ‘quiet,’ they didn’t get involved in politics,” Yousef said. Then, “When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, some of them decided to involve themselves.”

They hoped to have a space where “they controlled what was preached, without oversight,” according to Yousef.

On Aug. 14, 2009, Moussa declared an Islamic emirate from Rafah, directly challenging Hamas rule.

The armed followers of Moussa, Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Followers of God), and other Salafi offshoots sporadically attacked Hamas positions. They also murdered Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni in 2011, after attempting to force Hamas to release one of their leaders. Arrigoni’s killing was widely condemned. He was a beloved figure in Gaza.

The rockets were easily dealt with by Israel’s advanced “Iron Dome” missile defense system, and the IAF quickly retaliated by bombing three sites—two belonging to Hamas and another to Islamic Jihad. Israel promises to hold Hamas responsible for any rockets. So, when SOHB bombs, Hamas pays the price.

"We are concerned that additional North Korean provocations could heighten tensions, lead to a cycle of escalation," he said

There could be firing by the North Koreans, which then could prompt South Koreans to retaliate very quickly," she said

In an additional provocation, South Korean soldiers on Wednesday found anti-South Korea and anti-U.S. propaganda leaflets

North Korea defends its nuclear ambitions

But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday defended his nuclear program, saying his country needs the capability to strike the United States if provoked.

Researchers with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury said that the heavily edited film seemed to show black smoke, several fireballs and even possibly falling debris

What’s he doing with that power? He’s trying to negotiate deals. Unfortunately, he really, really doesn’t know what he’s doing. On trade, he’s a rebel without a clue.

last weekend he claimed to have reached a major trade understanding with China; but as J.P. Morgan soon reported in a note to its clients, his claims “seem if not completely fabricated then grossly exaggerated.”

The Chinese essentially rip off technology. So there is a case for toughening our stance on trade.

toughening should be undertaken in concert with other nations that also suffer from Chinese misbehavior, and it should have clear objectives. The last person you want to play hardball here is someone who doesn’t grasp the basics of trade policy, who directs his aggressiveness at everyone — tariffs on Canadian aluminum to protect our national security? Really? — and who can’t even give an honest account of what went down in a meeting.

Unfortunately, that’s the person who’s now in charge, and it’s hard to see how he can be restrained. So the future of world trade, with all it implies for the world economy, now hinges largely on Donald Trump’s mental processes

“This administration, in nominations, is not interested in people who have been critical of it,” Professor Adler said. “There is a belief that there is an element of vindictiveness in the administration that casts a shadow.”Marisa C. Maleck, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said she hoped the group’s efforts would embolden conservative critics to speak out about Mr. Trump’s actions. “He’s been president for a while now,” she said, “and there hasn’t been anyone willing to put himself out there.”Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa LererA spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

In interviews, the group’s members said they did not speak with a single voice and had varying concerns about the administration’s policies.

Professor Kerr summed up the new group’s basic point. “The rule of law has to come first,” he said. “Politics comes second.”

There is much to envy in Germany’s model. Harmony between firms and workers has been one of the main reasons for the economy’s outperformance.

Mr Trump has grasped an inconvenient truth. He has admonished Germany for its trade surplus, which stood at almost $300bn last year, the world’s largest (China’s hoard was a mere $200bn).

put a stop to sales of German cars—may be self-defeating, but the fact is that Germany saves too much and spends too little.

this is not the result of a mercantilist government policy, as some foreigners complain.

the increase in national saving has come from firms and the government.

It is an instinct that helps explain Germany’s transformation since the late 1990s from Europe’s sick man to today’s muscle-bound champion.

An imminent free-trade deal between Japan and the European Union will add substance to her rhetoric (see article).

This is one reason why the populist AfD party remains on the fringes of German politics.

Exporters do not invest their windfall profits at home. And Germany is not alone; Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands have been piling up big surpluses, too.

For a large economy at full employment to run a current-account surplus in excess of 8% of GDP puts unreasonable strain on the global trading system.

Perhaps Germany’s bumper trade surplus will be eroded as China’s was, by a surge in wages.

the German instinct for caution is deeply rooted.

Germany’s structural budget balance has gone from a deficit of over 3% of GDP in 2010 to a small surplus.

The economy lags behind in its readiness for digitalisation, ranking 25th in the world in average download speeds.

Above all, it is long past time for Germany to recognise that its excessive saving is a weakness.