Opinion

Anti-government marchers have been gathering across Thailand in defiance of a state of emergency, and their list of demands now stretches to include reining in the powerful monarchy. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha has indicated he wants to talk. He could do with listening, too. Discontent has simmered since a March 2019 election, but gathered steam late in the year with ...

The low costs of renewable energy that have enabled the world to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the past decade are continuing to fall, which is welcome news for the effort to address climate change. And now along comes hydrogen, a crucial new energy technology, to provide fresh reason to be optimistic about progress ahead. For the first time this year, ...

Brexit could one day give the European Union (EU) an opportunity to challenge the City of London’s dominance as a global financial hub. Right now, however, the EU is in no condition to take advantage. As talks on Britain’s future relationship with the union come down to the wire — yet again — London’s role as the bloc’s primary purveyor ...

The US election is weeks away and the doomsayers for the UK’s relationship with a post-Trump America are out in force. Joe Biden is “an Irish-American with no particular love for Boris Johnson or Brexit Britain” thundered a Times of London column last week. Other Conservative voices predict that a Democrat victory would be disastrous for the Brits and end ...

When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.” In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ ...

China’s ambitious pledge to decarbonise by 2060 requires the world’s top polluter to dramatically raise the cost of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A long-awaited national carbon market that is finally set to begin trading this year will be less demanding and more limited than initially anticipated, if draft plans are a guide. It’s worth welcoming anyway. Beijing could ...

Even before Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in 2016, the aphorism “It’s Trump’s party now” had been endlessly recycled by those delighted and dismayed by The Donald “body-snatching” the GOP and transforming its vision of America. To quantify just how far Trump’s rhetoric has moved his party’s nationalistic needle, Bloomberg Opinion asked Keatext — a Montreal-based AI text analytics company — ...

India’s Covid-19 economic gloom turned into despair on news that its per capita gross domestic product may be lower for 2020 than in neighbouring Bangladesh. “Any emerging economy doing well is good news,” Kaushik Basu, a former World Bank chief economist, tweeted after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) updated its World Economic Outlook. “But it’s shocking that India, which had ...

Upgrading to an iPhone 12? Apple Inc is happy to take your old phone off your hands. “If it’s in good shape, we’ll help it go to a new owner,” the company promises on the website promoting its trade-in program. “If not, we’ll send it to our recycling partner, so we can save more precious materials and take less from ...

For governments facing a growing wave of coronavirus cases as fall turns to winter, there’s a stark lesson in the stunning election victory for New Zealand’s incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: Voters really want their governments to suppress the pandemic. A landslide victory means Ardern could govern with the first outright majority since her country adopted proportional representation in the ...