Opinion

  Does it matter how many “likes” does your Facebook post gather when you are a powerful politician? Or how many followers do you have on Twitter? It does in India. Dozens of parliamentarians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have recently been chastised by their leadership for not being active enough on the Net. This is one of ...

The raw Sunni recruits in crisp camouflage uniforms, popping off rounds at the firing range at a US training camp here, illustrate the dilemma for the US as it seeks to form a strong military force to drive the IS from its capital, Raqqah. The US could try to build the Sunni army it would want, ideally, to capture Raqqah, ...

  Greek lawmakers were pragmatic when they took the painful decision on Sunday to approve unpopular tax increases, a new privatisation fund, and free up sale of non-performing loans in exchange for much-needed bailout loans and debt relief. They will hit Greeks where it hurts, with increases in value added tax by one point to 24 per cent, more tax ...

  Christopher Flavelle There may now be more campaigns devoted to selling a carbon tax than there are members of US Congress willing to support one. It’s unclear whether this shows progress toward an economy-wide price on carbon or how very far away it remains. The latest effort is the Climate Leadership Council, run by Ted Halstead, founder of the ...

  A new study by researchers at Harvard University estimates that Chinese government employees fabricate 488 million social media posts each year. As the first rigorous analysis of China’s online propaganda machine, the team found that the “Fifty Cent Party” or Wumao Dang—a derogatory term used to describe contract workers popularly believed to be making fifty cents per post—largely consists ...

  The cross-country demonstrations currently taking place in Vietnam to protest massive fish die-offs along the central Vietnamese coast are truly remarkable. Not only were demonstrations at this scale unheard of even five years ago, but they beg the question of why thousands of demonstrators as far off as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are subjecting themselves to the ...

  Dalton Lin SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Taiwan’s new president, Tsai Ing-wen, finally delivered her keenly anticipated and closely watched inaugural speech on May 20. China had made it clear ever since Tsai’s election that if she hoped for the peaceful and cooperative cross-strait relations over the past eight years to continue, she needed to come to terms with the ...

Could online lending cause the next financial crisis? While the odds seem overwhelmingly against it, the recent turmoil at LendingClub — a leading online lender — makes it hard not to ask the question. There are some disquieting parallels with subprime mortgages, which seemed beneficial until sloppy and fraudulent lending practices triggered a wider collapse of confidence. Are we about ...

  Campaign for a ‘stay’ or ‘leave’ the European Union (EU) is taking an ugly turn as both sides warn of dire consequences should the UK remain or exit the EU. In fact, both sides blend the scaremongering with facts to canvass votes of the groping voters who may decide the result of referendum. Boris Johnson, the leading ‘leave’ campaign ...

Narayana Kocherlakota I see four different schools of thought about how the economies of the U.S. and much of the developed world should be managed. The challenge for the Federal Reserve and other central bankers is that it’s hard to know who’s right. Let’s call the first group of economists the neutralists. They would say that as long as inflation ...