Opinion

A truck attack in Christmas market in Berlin killed 12 people. And IS group, as it has become customary with the extremists, claimed responsibility for the rampage. The claim came shortly after German prosecutors released a Pakistani asylum seeker who was the sole suspect in the case because of lack of evidence. The German investigators are probing the case from …

  WhiteOps, a US cybersecurity company, says it has uncovered the biggest online advertising scam ever, operated from Russia and making between $2.6 million and $5.2 million a day —as much as four times what the New York Times makes from advertising. The announcement should be a warning to anyone entrusted with a corporate budget to spend on online marketing: …

  India’s ‘House of Debt’ is still swaying, though a little less dangerously than before. For the country’s highly leveraged companies, the year is closing on a somewhat more cheerful note than seemed possible six months ago. First, it was the billionaire Ruia brothers delivering the good news to Standard Chartered Plc and other creditors. As much as $5 billion …

  What is Amazon.com Inc., exactly? If you answered “an online book retailer,” then you haven’t been paying attention for like, oh, the past decade or so. What seems like a straight-forward question is actually a much more complex and surprising inquiry than you might have guessed. I began thinking about this earlier this year, when we looked at whether …

  Most presidents wait until inauguration before sparking their first foreign policy crises. Donald Trump has a month to go and he has already wandered into two — one with China and one with Russia. How will these foreign challenges shape Trump’s early months in office? His freewheeling style seems to have discombobulated China, which has some unexpected benefits. But …

  As India continues its scorched-earth campaign against cash, the question baffling many analysts is why a country so unfamiliar with digital payments would outlaw 86 percent of its currency, the most-favoured method of settling transactions. Sample the following three factoids from a study led by Tufts University researchers: Fewer than 10% of Indians have ever used any kind of …

  A little over a year ago, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) swept to power promising to challenge the political elite, restore national control of the country’s affairs, and realign government with traditional conservative values. Since then concerns have grown, at home and in Europe’s capitals, that Poland has taken a wrong turn. The government’s most recent moves do …

  An off-duty Turkish cop killed Andrey Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Ankara. If this killing had happened few months back, the repercussion would have been unimaginable. The murder of Andrey Karlov, the first Moscow envoy to be killed in his post in almost 90 years, was an open provocation aimed at derailing the normalisation of Russian-Turkish relations and Syria peace …

  The past year was dominated by the bitter presidential election. But during the precious, brief moments when I was able to unplug from the madness and read about economics, I found a lot of great material. Here’s a list of 10 excellent economics books and papers I read in 2016 that should be accessible to the general public. 1. …

  It had become something of a ritual. Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would release the results of its PISA exams, which are given to hundreds of thousands of students in dozens of countries. And every three years, an American freak-out would ensue, as Chinese students seemed to be outperforming their U.S. counterparts by a …