Opinion

Mike Ashley is best known for selling cheap tracksuits in the UK Now, he is thinking more like a bling king. The billionaire behind Sports Direct, who bought out the fancy but failing department store chain House of Fraser in 2018, is elevating a scion to a senior role, just as it’s been done at LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton ...

There is an incontrovertible and sobering fact about the drive to net zero. Any effort that doesn’t work for the whole world will fail everywhere. A path that favours developed markets at the expense of others will lead to a partial net zero, which is no net zero at all. Unfortunately, too many countries, companies and investors see achieving this ...

Imagine a future in which foreign dissidents traveling to Washington are sued by their governments in US courts for defamation. A federal court may be on the verge of making this nightmare a reality. Last month a group of US government commissions and human-rights organisations, including the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and Freedom House, filed amicus briefs urging the ...

Lawyers are accustomed to dismissing the various arguments that Donald Trump has made in court over the years, or even laughing at them. His claim that he should be immune from lawsuits for his actions on Janaury 6 because he was exercising his official duties is a little different. It needs to be considered seriously in the context of his ...

In the early days of the pandemic, a Sinophobic American president delighted in melodramatically calling the bug “the China virus.” After all, it was nasty — another word he relishes — just like, in his opinion, that rival power. In terms purely of nomenclature, Donald Trump was actually in excellent historic company. As long as anybody can remember, people have ...

Jeff Bezos, since stepping away from Amazon.com Inc, has become the latest billionaire to head to space. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg is eyeing life in the metaverse. But don’t expect to see Warren Buffett riding on the next rocket ship for his 91st birthday this month or talking up virtual dimensions in Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s earnings report. Unlike some ...

Once a regime has plucked a commercial airliner out of the sky to snatch a single journalist, its capacity to shock the rest of the world should theoretically diminish. And yet, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has managed. At home, he has brutally suppressed civil society and critics, with one would-be adversary from 2020’s presidential race sentenced to 14 years in ...

Did you hear? Facebook Inc is going to become a metaverse company. At least that’s the story its management wants everyone to believe after a flurry of interviews and announcements over the past couple of weeks. It’s a narrative that seeks to put the social-media giant at the leading edge of one of the most audacious concepts in tech. I’m ...

It’s hard to find logic in the actions of a leadership that attacks doctors and nurses at the height of a pandemic. And yet that’s happening in Myanmar. In response to civil disobedience by medical staff after a military coup in February, soldiers have hijacked ambulances, arrested personnel and confiscated equipment. In a collapsing state, it’s helping to accelerate a ...

The Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell have come under fire the last couple of months for seemingly ignoring the spike in inflation. The latest salvo came, when Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, urged Powell to start pulling back on the Fed’s $120 billion in monthly bond purchases aimed at providing stimulus. Failing to do so “will lead ...