Opinion

President Joe Biden’s early efforts on immigration have focused on quickly mending the damage done by his predecessor. Quite right. President Trump was especially active, and especially foolish, on immigration, so there’s plenty to undo. But Biden is also looking farther ahead, and he’s proposed a comprehensive immigration reform that’s meant to resolve the issue for the foreseeable future. This ...

Some time last year I had a revealing conversation with a director of a European bank about succession planning for the chief executive officer job. The board member let slip that the real reason a woman might be on the candidate list was because the company simply had to be seen ticking that box. The director quickly tried to correct ...

On the internet, as a friend recently reminded me, everything looks permanent until it isn’t. As technology evolves, the most profound and destabilising change is likely to be the transition from centralised internet services to decentralised ones. Centralised services typically are run by companies or institutions, such as Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. There is a command structure and a boss, ...

A global shortage of semiconductor chips is ravaging supply chains and hasn’t shown signs of abating. Don’t be surprised if it lasts another year. Carmakers from Ford Motor Co to General Motors Co and Toyota Motor Corp have cut production because of it. Several continue to idle assembly lines across the world. US senators are now urging the White House ...

It’s clear that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t care too much what her congressional colleagues think of her: The day after she was stripped of her committee assignments in response to her long trail of vile QAnon-related rhetoric, she was boasting in person and on Twitter about how the sanction just means she will have more free time. Just as ...

Figuring out how to combine science with fairness in Covid-19 vaccine distribution is a tricky puzzle. Science can help predict how to distribute limited doses to minimise overall deaths, but that means acting fast, which might compromise fairness. That’s how we end up with outrage when hospital administrators get shots ahead of nursing home residents, or, as The Atlantic reports, ...

India’s economy has suffered more than most from the pandemic and so have its people. The country has lost more than a year’s worth of growth and perhaps a decade’s progress in its efforts to reduce poverty. The economic contraction — the first in India since the 1970s — has put pressure on its government like so many others to ...

Is Texas really a serious rival to California as a destination for high-tech? The growing exodus of banner companies — Oracle Corp, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co, Tesla Inc’s Space-X and others — suggests that there’s something to the idea. Still, skeptics rightly point out that plenty of other places have made a bid to become the new Silicon Valley and never ...

In 2019, Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG explored (and abandoned) plans to fix their broken models by merging. Since then, they have been making some progress on their own and up against the pandemic. After five years in the red, Deutsche finally returned to a meager profit, while Commerzbank, the smaller rival, is at last embarking on a much-needed ...

It took all of 15 seconds for Vice President Kamala Harris to render mostly irrelevant a data release that has long been considered one of the most important in the world. The latest read on the US labour market was disappointing, with nonfarm payrolls increasing by just 49,000 in January, falling short of the median estimate of a 105,000 gain ...