Opinion

Japan looks like it may finally open its borders and end its splendid isolation. The key question is: Can it learn to love foreign tourists again? After a series of head fake border re-openings this year which promised more than they delivered, a report that Japan would scrap most restrictions on tourists was the big one. If realised, the plans ...

  New electric models from Rivian Automotive Inc and Lucid Group Inc have won rave reviews, but you’ll have to be patient to drive one. Since commencing production one year ago, the two companies have produced only around 10,000 vehicles altogether as of June 30. Compare that with Volkswagen AG, which manufactures twice that every day. As the startups are ...

  Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, allied nations have unleashed a suite of sanctions so rapid and broad in its reach that there are no true precedents. Even, say, curbs on Venezuela — oil producer cut off from global finance — are by necessity imperfect. But there’s another commodity exporter whose experience offers less obvious lessons for sanctioning nations and ...

Having launched a war of aggression and failed to win it, Russian President Vladimir Putin has little to celebrate these days. What will cheer him is seeing lots of western Europeans take to the streets this fall. He’ll use every prod and spur in his disinformation arsenal to goad the protesters into dividing their own societies — thereby weakening the ...

The world of management is abuzz about the idea of “quiet quitting” — the Gen Z, TikTok-boosted term for doing nothing more at work than the job description demands. Of course, there’s nothing new about this phenomenon — if Gen Z knew how to dial a call, they would understand the age-old concept of “phoning it in.” The inability to ...

  The world is parched. In California, a record heat wave has exacerbated the western US’s worst drought in centuries. Water levels in Europe’s Rhine River have been so low that at times over recent weeks this vital European waterway has been all but impassable to shipping. Asia’s longest river, the Yangtze, has struggled to feed farms and hydroelectric stations. ...

  White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain has taken to tweeting the price of a gallon of gasoline on a daily basis, a habit that’s convenient for him as long as it continues its steady decline. The idea that President Joe Biden’s administration is somehow responsible for this decrease is wrong, of course, but the White House certainly took ...

She wasn’t just Britain’s Queen — Elizabeth II belonged to the world. It’s moving how the peoples of so many nations embraced this quiet, emotionally reticent woman who reigned in a country that once bestrode the world as an empire. In her decades at the helm, she found a different role, with monarchy as the glue of continuity. In the ...

If 2021 was the breakthrough year for mRNA vaccines, then 2022 may be the breakthrough year for artificial intelligence. So far there have been major advances in text generation and image generation, and now investor Nat Friedman is predicting big developments in AI personal voice assistants. More innovation will surely follow. With so much in the works, it is worth ...

  What can rich countries do to help the developing world battle climate change? What’s happening in South Africa right now embodies that central question of fairness. Africa’s third largest economy is also the world’s 12th most serious emitter of carbon dioxide. At COP26 in Glasgow last November — the UK, US, France, Germany and the rest of the EU ...