Opinion

Once people have been vaccinated against Covid-19, they’re safer to dine out, fly on airplanes, attend concerts and movies, work out at the gym, go to the office, cross borders and otherwise move about — as long as they wear masks around other people indoors, avoid large groups and keep their distance. How can they demonstrate that they have this ...

If it wasn’t for last year’s extraordinary events, there would be nothing even remotely remarkable about Jayshri Hodkar’s struggle to survive as a single mother of two on the earnings of her tailoring shop, a single machine in one room of a rented house. It’s one of those tens of millions of tiny businesses you see everywhere in India. Most ...

Senegal’s President Macky Sall seems finally to have quelled the violence that marked two weeks of opposition protests and government crackdowns and left at least eight dead. But repairing the reputational damage to one of Africa’s most peaceful and stable countries will require statesmanship of a higher order than Sall has so far shown. The question now is whether the ...

How is it that auto companies spend so much money and there is such vague disclosure on where it’s going? Or how their ambitious projects are progressing? Investors should be pushing accounting standards boards and companies to give them more. With the onset of electric cars and autonomous vehicles, companies are increasing their focus on technology and technical know-how over ...

Among the unsettling revelations about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is the number of rioters who served in the military. Of the more than 300 people so far charged with crimes, at least 30 are veterans, and three are currently enlisted in either the Army Reserve or National Guard. The Pentagon believes some active-duty troops also participated ...

Comparisons of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to the New Deal are flourishing. They obscure the fact that Biden’s achievement — passing reform legislation against an intransigent opposition — is very fragile. Republicans are already waging an extensive culture war on issues cherished by progressive Democrats, starting with freer immigration. And though Biden and his colleagues are taking ...

The world is watching Europe with dismay. The region’s vaccination campaign is a mess, failing to outpace a fresh wave of Covid-19 infections that’s straining hospitals and triggering more stay-at-home curbs. The European Union’s tally of average doses administered per 100 people stands at 11.8, well behind the US and the UK at 34.1 and 40.5 respectively (though there is ...

Back in 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was incorrectly quoted as saying she couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon had won a 49-state landslide since she didn’t know anyone who’d voted for him. The anecdote is often trotted out as an example of liberal snobbery and indifference to “ordinary” Americans. Kael’s actual quote was more self-aware: “I live in ...

It’s no surprise that Italy was the first European Union nation to say it would restart AstraZeneca Covid vaccinations, just moments after the bloc’s drugs regulator gave its renewed blessing for the shots. All of the EU’s big member states need to jumpstart their painfully slow vaccine drives, but Italy’s need is greatest. The country has suffered more deaths than ...

A water emergency in Crimea is absorbing billions of taxpayer rubles as Russia tries to patch up an impossible problem stemming from the peninsula’s annexation in 2014. President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea gem looks increasingly like a millstone. Ukraine dammed the North Crimean Canal seven years ago, cutting off the source of nearly 90% of the region’s fresh water and ...