Opinion

  An allocation of AED5 billion in contracts to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) announced by Dubai Expo 2020 manifests the importance that the UAE gives to the sector. The recent federal bankruptcy law is also aimed at boosting investment by SMEs to vitalize the country’s business landscape. Today, the segment is contributing 60% to the GDP of the UAE …

  The failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to disclose that she has come down with pneumonia amplifies the parallels between this U.S. presidential election campaign and the 1996 contest that opposed the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. The two presidential races are similar in their negative framing. In Russia 20 years ago and in …

  Two European companies — French drugmaker Sanofi and German household products maker Henkel — last week became the first firms to persuade investors to pay them to borrow euros. By selling bonds yielding minus 0.05 of a percentage point, they may well have signaled the bond market’s peak, delivering this decade’s equivalent of the “Ukrainian Chicken Farm Moment.” That …

  Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is “Will the robots take our jobs?” This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call “skill-biased technological change” — people who are technically …

  David Davis, the U.K.’s new Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, made a statement to the House of Commons this week on the meaning of “Brexit means Brexit.” Commentators were roundly unimpressed. If I may be allowed to say, their apparent determination to be unimpressed is beginning to grate. To be sure, the complaints were partly justified: …

  The European Central Bank is expected to extend its quantitative easing program further during the meeting of its governing council this week. The irony is that while the ECB has various options for continuing a program that isn’t working, national governments have relatively few options for embarking on one that most agree is sorely needed. As Mario Draghi and …

  When NASA officials recently dropped in on their counterparts in Beijing, they arrived in secret, issued no press release and, when queried by a reporter, initially didn’t acknowledge the meeting. The topic of such furtive talks? The two sides merely hoped to work together on climate satellites. As it happens, doing so may well be illegal. Since 2011, Congress …

  Small low-lying islands are vulnerable even to mild climate swings. The monster of global warming is posing an existential threat to them. The annual regional summit of 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which kicked off on Thursday, saw an upbeat start despite the clouds of uncertainty hovering over these countries. Reason behind the euphoria: They felt that they had …

You’ve probably been thinking to yourself, “Gee, I wish I couldn’t charge my phone while also listening to music.” Or perhaps, “Gosh, if only my headphones were more expensive, easier to lose and required frequent charging.” If so, you’re in luck. Apple’s newest iPhone, unveiled on Wednesday, lacks the familiar 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. You can listen to music through the …

It is tragic and fitting that President Barack Obama’s latest failure to reach a cease-fire in Syria would take place at Hangzhou, China, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit Monday. It’s tragic because this latest diplomatic flop in Syria will mean the death toll in that civil war, already at a staggering 400,000, will grow. It’s fitting, though, because …