Opinion

At least we’re learning. Remember when the early reaction to the outbreak of a deadly virus in Wuhan was to discourage people from changing their travel plans? South Africa’s government didn’t sit on information about a new worrying variant of Sars-CoV-2, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has now dubbed omicron. It didn’t downplay it. On the contrary, authorities shared ...

Now that President Joe Biden has signed the $550 billion infrastructure legislation, $15 billion will be spent to remove lead from the nation’s drinking-water systems. Of all the economic and social necessities in the spending package — from roadways and bridges to the power grid and broadband expansion — ensuring access to safe, clean water is perhaps the most fundamental. ...

Brexit was supposed to let the UK “take back control” of its borders from others, namely the European Union (EU). Yet, as with so many other simplistic slogans echoed by populist administrations around the world, it has managed to achieve the opposite. In Northern Ireland, it has threatened peace and created new political divisions over the compromises needed to avoid ...

Investors must be wondering what promise New Delhi will break next as the ruling party tries to win upcoming state elections. First, the government made a U-turn on the three laws that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted to use to shake up the stagnant farm economy. Next, he may delay implementing the four codes that have been billed as the ...

There’s a grim inevitability to the fact that the latest concerning strain of the Covid-19 virus — known as B.1.1.529, and now nicknamed the Omicron variant 1 — should have been first identified in South Africa. So far, Sars-CoV-2’s most devastating impacts have been in developed countries. The US, UK and European Union have accounted for about a third of ...

In the 2000s, the growing ubiquity of bank branches was one of America’s great retailing puzzles. Online banking was on the rise and the industry was consolidating, but branches kept popping up seemingly everywhere — if you define “everywhere” as the reasonably affluent parts of cities and suburbs. That ended with the financial crisis. The number of bank branches in ...

Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi signed a treaty at the Quirinale palace in Rome to get France and Italy working together better. That’s good news for Europe. It’s also tinder for populists. How their countries — both founding members of the European Union — pull off cooperation will determine how much nearer the continent’s dream of “ever closer union” gets ...

The border between the US and Mexico is located in a large room. From the Mexican side, you get there by walking through a series of hallways. You may also take some elevators. It’s clean, quiet and orderly — more DMV than Versailles. This description may not comport with the images of the border you may have seen on television. ...

Breakups are tough — even amicable ones. But a reassessment usually lays bare the issues that inform the future. So it’s worth wondering about the relationship between the century-old Ford Motor Co and recently-floated electric vehicle company Rivian Automotive Inc. It was meant to work — on paper. A large, traditional manufacturer ties up with a new startup that boasts ...

Pity the poor saps who piled into shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd when it was a $750 billion behemoth and the sky still appeared to be the limit. That includes a lot of retirement savers in Hong Kong, who became involuntary investors last year when the company was added to the city’s benchmark Hang Seng Index. By any yardstick, ...