Opinion

  Thousands of Russians protested in many cities across the country against official corruption. It was apparently the biggest anti-government demonstrations since 2012, when the wave of protests against alleged vote-rigging led Kremlin enforce harsher laws to suppress dissent. People heeded the call of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a bête noir of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Police have arrested hundreds …

  Relatively quietly, India’s government has just undertaken an unprecedented power grab—one that should worry not just citizens and taxpayers but also foreign investors. And it comes in the most unlikely of places: the annual Union budget. The presentation of the budget is a fairly splashy event; it’s announced by the finance minister in a speech to Parliament that usually …

  Tesco Plc is close to settling with prosecutors over its 2014 profit overstatement. The retailer could within weeks strike a deal with Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, according to Sky News, including a fine of more than 100 million pounds ($126 million). That’s not insignificant. Tesco’s operating profit is expected to be about 1.2 billion pounds in this financial year, …

  The San Francisco-based photo-sharing site Pinterest would seem to rank low on the list of potential threats to China. Beloved by fashion designers, photographers, cooks and hobbyists, the seven-year-old website is a global hub for the sharing of images, trends and ideas on topics ranging from living-room design to what to cook at your Saturday barbecue. Unfortunately, Pinterest Inc.’s …

  Donald Trump boasts that he has been an economic genius, creating jobs, cutting $12 billion off the national debt and overseeing a soaring stock market in just his first two months. These claims are largely phony. He may need braggadocio, though, because on the economy he has been dealt a bad hand politically. This problem is likely to be …

  How to command a premium for mediocrity? If that question is posed to Postal Savings Bank of China Co., which counts almost half the people in the world’s most-populous nation as its customers, the answer may well be ‘superior tax planning.’ The Hong Kong-listed Chinese lender enjoys an 8 percent to 26 percent valuation premium over the four largest …

  Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford found something constructive to tell senators on an appropriations subcommittee this week, even if it had nothing to do with the Pentagon budget. The two men challenged lawmakers to finally provide a legal basis for the U.S. war against terrorist groups. It’s something that President Barack …

  Iraqi and coalition forces launched the operation to liberate western Mosul, the most populated urban areas, from IS extremists on February 19. Since then the Iraqi forces have wrested back a series of neighbourhoods. Troops have also retaken the city’s airport, a sprawling military complex, the main government compound. The offensive is being waged from three directions advancing along …

  The Socialist candidate for the French presidency, Benoit Hamon, says he doesn’t believe in the ‘myth’ and “quasi-religion” of growth– it’s part of the “consumerist, productivist and materialist model” of development, he argues. That’s outside the economic mainstream, and many see those views as a symptom of the meltdown of the global left. But the just-released Global Happiness Report …

  The global smartphone market has seen better days, yet the industry underpins the hottest stocks in Asia’s best-performing sector this year. The MSCI Asia Pacific Infotech index is up almost 16 percent in 2017, outgunning the runner up (industrials) by just shy of 7 percentage points. And leading that sub-index, in dollar terms, are smartphone suppliers. What’s interesting is …