Opinion

Fires that have consumed swathes of Australia, the Arctic and now the western US are lighting only a tiny flame under climate action for the world’s top polluters. It’s hard to imagine how the past two years could have included more environmental alarm bells, from the ancient peatlands ablaze in the thawing north to mercury hitting just over 54 degrees ...

Two unpopular leaders, two powerful backers. Pictures of Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko beaming for the cameras, leaning in eagerly to address an impassive Russian president, evoked another pair 4,000 miles away and months earlier. Against a similar background of street unrest, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam found support from China’s President Xi Jinping last year. It’s not a parallel ...

Is Boeing Co capable of making commercial aircraft at all? It’s worth asking after an excoriating report by a US congressional committee on the circumstances leading up to the fatal crashes of two 737 MAX planes. The accidents were “the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of ...

Whether your company is pushing employees to return to the office, a la JPMorgan, or letting them stay home, a la Google, Deutsche Bank and pretty much everyone else, the question remains: What the heck to do with the kids? The US remains a confusing patchwork of partially open, partially closed schools. Children learning via screen need supervision to help ...

Having failed to complete a huge wall along the US southern border, President Donald Trump’s administration now seems desperate to build one in cyberspace for similar spurious reasons. Whereas the bogeyman four years ago was a supposed influx of drugs and criminals from Mexico, the US announced that Tencent Holdings Ltd’s instant-messaging app WeChat will essentially be shut down in ...

North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham said during a debate that he would be “hesitant” to take a coronavirus vaccine if it’s rolled out in the next few months. “I’m going to ask a lot of questions,” he said. “I think that’s incumbent on all of us right now with the way we’ve seen politics intervening in Washington.” Cunningham ...

The pandemic and its economic fallout are going to make it exceedingly difficult for retailers to have a merry Christmas. The industry is expected to see an uptick in seasonal sales of a measly 1% to 1.5%, according to a forecast released by Deloitte, which would be well below the 4.1% increase the industry recorded last year. New shopping patterns ...

The euro region has taken several steps to centralise banking regulation and supervision, but there is little sign that lenders are interested in seeking to merge beyond national borders. Two recent deals — one has been proposed in Spain, the other occurred in Italy — show that, for all the good intentions, Europe’s “banking union” remains incomplete. The European Central ...

There was no puff of white smoke, but Japan has a new Prime Minister. Yoshihide Suga, who was Chief Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, won an overwhelming victory in an internal contest within the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party. Widely considered to have been one of the chief architects of Abenomics, Suga is likely to keep the government’s focus ...

If Europe has a strategy to stop the spread of Covid-19, it’s keeping it well hidden. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has vowed not to go back to the dark days of national lockdown, preferring instead to “live” with the coronavirus disease, but his government is struggling to halt a jump in cases. France reported more than 10,000 new cases in ...