Opinion

When the coherent half of the Republican ticket participated in the vice presidential debate, it was an opportunity for viewers to learn what the future holds. Yes, Vice President Mike Pence may be a talking-point machine, but to a debate audience that’s a more useful device than a random-lie generator. You can learn things from talking points. There’s only one ...

Vladimir Putin has long sought to portray himself as strong statesman and guarantor of stability, at home and abroad. Now the Russian president is grappling with successive crises among his country’s neighbours. It’s an unwelcome test of Moscow’s role as regional watchman. From Belarus to the Caucasus, the Kremlin cannot leave the outcomes of these flare-ups to chance. Yet the ...

Apple Inc has been in the spotlight lately, between antitrust scrutiny of its mobile operating system and the legal battle it’s waging with Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc over its App Store. Those developments pale, however, in comparison to the company’s main event next week: the unveiling of its latest iPhones. For all the talk about Apple’s shift to services ...

Unless you learned Latin and Greek or went to medical school, words such as “sequelae,” “encephalopathy” or “anosmia” probably mean nothing to you. That may be about to change, at least if you try to keep up with the literature about Covid-19. And if you’re like me, the more you learn, the more you’ll worry. Sequelae are the aftereffects of ...

With less than a month remaining in the presidential campaign, the country faces the specter of a chaotic Election Day. President Donald Trump has urged his supporters to “go in to the polls and watch very carefully” — a suggestion that can be interpreted as a call for greater participation in the long-established practice of election observing, or as an ...

The brutal experience of Covid-19’s first wave humbled many rich countries where even generous healthcare systems were overwhelmed by an unfamiliar virus. Just as past outbreaks taught Asia hard truths about how to deal with pandemics, lessons from this novel coronavirus abound in the West: Italy has ramped up intensive-care capacity, France is paying health workers better and Spain is ...

There are no fireworks over Cinderella Castle these days, and yet investors remain captivated by Walt Disney Co. Are they caught up in fantasy? The whimsical palace overlooking Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, has long stood as a symbol of the company and its status as both a source of enchantment and an impenetrable fortress in the entertainment world. ...

It’s finally here. After an investigation that lasted more than a year, a US House antitrust subcommittee has come up with a robust game plan to rein in the biggest tech giants. In a report, the panel accused Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc — whose collective market value is more than $5 trillion — ...

President Donald Trump has told his team to stop discussing a new stimulus package until after the election. He should pay closer attention to what Jerome Powell said to the National Association for Business Economics a few hours before. Without additional fiscal stimulus, Powell warned, the economic recovery might very well falter. What the Federal Reserve chairman called “normal recessionary ...

For the first time since 2011, Apple Inc didn’t release a version of its flagship iPhone in September. That delay has had a massive ripple effect through its network of vendors, which makes parsing supply-chain data even more challenging than usual. Since at least March, we knew that the next installment of the iconic device would be pushed back due ...