Opinion

In January, Joe Biden will take charge of an executive branch left in woeful disrepair. Practically every important federal institution has been scorched by four years of sustained assault by his predecessor — none more so than the State Department. President Donald Trump has damaged American diplomacy in word and deed. His secretaries of state, first Rex Tillerson and then ...

President Donald Trump keeps claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and was replete with fraud. He has spread the false assertion that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems Inc deleted millions of pro-Trump votes and shifted hundreds of thousands to his victorious opponent, President-elect Joe Biden. Many Republicans agree that the presidency has been stolen. Polls ...

Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s reported pick as Treasury secretary, is surely one of the most qualified nominees for the job in history. Not only has she been chair of the Federal Reserve and the White House Council of Economic Advisers, but she also enjoys widespread bipartisan respect, which will benefit her in coming negotiations over Covid relief. The markets ...

How much risk will a vital hub of global commerce entertain to open an important chunk of the economy? None, appears to be the answer, judging by the suspension of the Hong Kong-Singapore travel bubble on the eve of its debut. The two finance and transport centres hit pause on what would have been the world’s first quarantine-free bubble, citing ...

Most Western countries have suffered mightily from Covid-19, but Britain still managed to stand out for all the wrong reasons during the first wave of the pandemic. There was the initial see-sawing between whether to follow a Swedish-style laissez faire approach or more draconian measures, the struggles with test and trace and confusing public communications. Still, there appears to be ...

Could anyone have doubted that Donald Trump would go out like this? Having lost the election decisively — by 74 votes in the Electoral College, and by 6 million and counting overall — he has availed himself of every imaginable scheme to undermine the vote’s legitimacy and obscure what was plainly a fair and square victory for his opponent, President-elect ...

In the first half of 2020, Europe mounted a bold and swift economic response to the Covid recession. As the second wave of the pandemic triggers a new slowdown, policy makers appear to have lost some of their mojo. Governments are struggling to deal effectively with the health crisis, as they dither between keeping economies open and imposing new restrictions. ...

As Britain draws close to its exit from the European Union, a diminished role for the City of London looks ever more likely. This may be a gradual change, and its potential scale may be debated, but parts of the financial infrastructure built up over decades are ready to hop across the Channel. News that Goldman Sachs Group Inc is ...

As an increasing body of evidence suggests America’s new anti-Covid vaccines are both efficacious and safe, the question of how to distribute those vaccines assumes greater importance. One poll suggests that Americans think healthcare workers, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems should receive vaccines very early. But what to do after that? There is an uncomfortable truth here: ...

A classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” from 1961, “It’s a Good Life,” features a telepathic, malicious 6-year-old brat named Anthony who holds an entire town hostage. Anthony transforms one adult who crosses him into a jack-in-the-box. Everybody else who wants to survive kowtows. “It’s real fine that you’ve done that, that’s real fine,” the local grocer tells Anthony after ...