Opinion

Ask enough gamers about their favourite console and this is what you’ll generally learn: Those who play Xbox tend to love it and stay loyal to that system, but PlayStation has the best games. Microsoft Corp, Xbox’s parent company, is betting $7.5 billion that it can change that perception. Microsoft agreed to acquire ZeniMax Media Inc, the owner of popular ...

More than 70% of Americans hold unfavourable views of China, a historical high, as many find fault in its handling of Covid-19. Yet that hasn’t stopped Americans from staking their retirements on the nation through their mutual funds. US residents have amassed roughly $700 billion worth of mainland stock over the years, mostly in the technology sector. Government data may ...

If the number of lily pads on a pond doubles every day, and it takes 29 days for them to cover the entire pond, on what day is the pond half-covered? This brainteaser is how Martin Hirsch, head of the Paris region’s hospital network, describes the brutal first wave of Covid-19 that triggered lockdowns across Europe in March and April. ...

Americans who think the coming election is their last chance to save the republic from authoritarianism — Americans, until recently, like me — are almost certainly wrong. Authoritarianism is already here, and what Americans will decide in November is whether it will grow more deeply entrenched. According to a new report, the US is undergoing “substantial autocratisation” — so much ...

China may be the only major economy to notch growth at all in 2020, quite the reversal after the onset of Covid-19 triggered a historic collapse early in the year. This revival has been reflected in the yuan, Asia’s best performing currency this quarter. There’s good reason to think it isn’t a fluke. Bloomberg Economics projects China’s gross domestic product ...

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has a history of shrugging off crises. A decade ago, Europe’s No. 1 operator of top-tier shopping malls and offices doled out cash to shareholders even as banks collapsed and austerity ruled. The rise of online shopping only pushed it further to keep buying trophies like Westfield. That halo of invincibility has well and truly slipped after Covid-19. The ...

Boris Johnson is right back where he was six months ago: faced with a choice of how far to clamp down on freedoms in order to suppress the coronavirus’s transmission. Only then the strategy was simple. Britain’s lockdown was to protect the capacity of the National Health Service (NHS) in order to save lives. This time, the goal is more ...

The barbs being traded across the Atlantic, between British Conservatives and American Democrats, are a reminder of how this US presidential race is an awkward one for Boris Johnson’s Tories. Whisper it, but Donald Trump has been almost as influential in reshaping the means and mien of the UK’s Conservative Party as he has the Republican Party. Many Tories quite ...

Narendra Modi says, “Make in India.” Toyota Motor Corp says, stop treating cars as though they were like objectionable items. The Japanese carmaker has a point about the tax structure being unviable for the industry, and Shekar Viswanathan, vice chairman of the India unit, made it forcefully in an interview to Anurag Kotoky of Bloomberg News. However, instead of trying ...

Is plastics recycling a lie? That’s the question at the heart of a new investigation into whether Americans have been filling up their blue bins with misplaced hope. The evidence on the side of recycling doesn’t look good. As far back as 1974, industry insiders were doubting whether plastics could ever be recycled economically. More recently, China’s decision to severely ...