Opinion

The trillion-dollar spending package that the Senate has passed along to the House is being described as a once-in-a-generation fix for America’s deteriorating infrastructure. It should be viewed as only the first in a long series of such big investments, because Earth’s climate is changing faster than America’s existing roads, bridges and other infrastructure can withstand. In the past 12 ...

The rapid fall of Afghanistan to Taliban control presents the UK and its Nato allies with two primary dilemmas — the first is immediately pressing, the second has longer-term implications. The urgent task is to determine a policy for Afghans seeking refuge. Although there are many calls, from lawmakers and the media, to offer more support, asylum policy has been ...

For many consumers, this fall’s Apple Inc iPhone lineup may not be a “must have” with its modest improvements compared with last year’s big 5G upgrade. But the smartphone maker is doing something, well, smart. The company is focusing feature enhancements for its new models towards a key constituency: creators and influencers. And it will pay dividends. Last week, Bloomberg ...

New Zealand made the right call to shelve a widely anticipated interest-rate increase. The central bank should resist the temptation to merely delay by a month or two. The global recovery has probably peaked and the most consequential monetary authorities in the world are loath to contemplate tightening for at least a year. This isn’t the time for New Zealand ...

Tencent Holdings Ltd’s $223 billion portfolio of shares helped it post record earnings in the June quarter. But with regulators on the warpath, the Chinese games and social media company will be looking to profit from a different type of investment: contrition. While most famous for its WeChat messenger and booming online games business, almost half its profit last quarter ...

In 2006, as a Navy vice admiral, I was in Iraq traveling with Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. At a town hall with US troops, he famously answered a question about the US Army’s lack of armored vehicles by saying, “You go to war with the army you have — not the army you might want or wish to have ...

Hong Kong has decided to live with the fear of the virus, instead of the virus itself. If the territory wants to survive in a post-pandemic world, then the false bubble of security it has created can’t last. Last week, a 38-year-old vaccinated woman tested positive with the L452R mutant strain, present in the Delta variant of the virus. She ...

The resignation of Muhyiddin Yassin as Malaysia’s prime minister closes one chapter in the country’s political travails. The exit is unlikely to end the parliamentary bloodletting or solve the economic and health crises rocking a nation that was once a bastion of stability in Southeast Asia. As long as the ethnic-Malay ruling class is split, questions of legitimacy that undermined ...

On August 15, the US marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of fiat currency, or a currency that depends on faith in the Federal Reserve and not in the gold standard. Like most 50th anniversaries, this one shows the celebrant worse for wear. The “almighty dollar” is facing a raft of challenges from other supra-national currency powerhouses such as ...

As the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, university lecturers gathered their female students for some final goodbyes. Telling the shocked young women “we may not meet again,” the lecturers, along with everyone else, were evacuated, and the universities, along with schools, offices and shops, were shuttered. I spoke by phone with Aisha Khurram, one of those students whose ...