Opinion

With the $28 billion he’s raised working from home, India’s richest man wants to step into the breach created by the technology cold war between America and China. The two Silicon Valley tech giants that gave him a third of the money will help put him there. It’s an audacious plan. Politicians in many nations, including the US, the UK ...

The bad news is that people still have very little interest in flying in the middle of a pandemic. But the silver lining — for investors at least — is that at least some airlines are accepting and adapting to that reality. Delta Air Lines Inc said it would add back only about 500 flights in August, down from an ...

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has enjoyed the kind of popularity usually reserved for rock stars and royalty. Urbane without being aloof and one of the government’s best communicators, he has put the full weight of the Treasury into cushioning the economic blow of the pandemic and preserving jobs. Now he has to figure out how to pay ...

Congress is weighing a big idea as it bargains over the next stimulus package: a bipartisan proposal to expand national-service programs to create jobs, help contain the coronavirus pandemic and begin to unify a divided country. This plan would be a powerful tonic for some of what’s ailing the United States. It’s evocative of the New Deal programs that helped ...

People keep saying not to worry so much about the Covid-19 surge in Florida, because it isn’t killing a lot of people. I’m not buying it. And I’m sorry to predict that by early August, deaths in Florida will be almost as bad as New York at its worst. Florida and New York have similar populations (21.5 million and 19.5 ...

For SoftBank Group Corp Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son, selling a stake in Arm, the British semiconductor firm that kicked off his tech spending splurge, cannot have been part of the plan. At least, not yet. When SoftBank agreed to buy the Cambridge, England-based firm for 24 billion pounds ($32 billion) four years ago, the expectation was that it wouldn’t ...

About two months after Moderna Therapeutics Inc released preliminary Covid-19 vaccine data that sent the stock market into a tizzy, the company published a complete look at the initial human trial of its drug — and it promptly moved the market again. Moderna shares surged 20% on the results in after-market trading, and stocks in general got a loft as ...

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of “fascism” than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression. Europe’s revolutionary tradition exalted liberty, equality and fraternity until revolutionary fascism sacrificed the first to the second and third. Fascism fancied itself ...

The course of the Covid-19 pandemic in rural Mower County, Minnesota, is hand-written across six easel-sized sheets of paper affixed to the wall of the local Emergency Operations Center. Six cases and no deaths were recorded on March 22, the first entry. Pam Kellogg, Mower County’s community health division manager, points to the fourth sheet, covering much of May. “It ...

Second waves of coronavirus outbreaks may not mean reimposing blanket restrictions on activity in Asia. The region’s economies, which have seen more than half a century of growth grind to a halt, won’t be able to handle it. That means the future will be speckled with pocket-size lockdowns. Leaders are wary of repeating the huge contractions in commerce that came ...