Opinion

What was a turbulent enough week for TikTok turned downright bizarre. Already, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had warned that the Trump administration was looking at banning the short-video platform owned by Beijing-based parent ByteDance Ltd over data-privacy concerns, and President Donald Trump himself said he was considering banning TikTok as one way to retaliate against China over the coronavirus. ...

By ordering foreign college students who are unable to take in-person classes this fall to leave the US, the Trump administration has plumbed new depths of heartless incompetence. At best, the order will cause needless anxiety and expense for both colleges and students. At worst, it might wreck college finances, destroy jobs and facilitate the spread of the coronavirus. Inflicting ...

By commuting the prison sentence of Roger Stone, President Donald Trump has made his contempt for the rule of law plain for all to see. Clemency for a crony convicted of interfering with an investigation of presidential malfeasance is a flagrant abuse of power. President Richard Nixon wasn’t willing to pardon the Watergate criminals who broke into Democratic Party offices ...

Today’s racial turmoil, which was detonated by a Minneapolis instance of lethal police behavior towards an African American, is more serious than any since 1992. Then, after the verdict exonerating the police who beat an African American, Rodney King, six days of rioting engulfed a swath of Los Angeles, killing 63 and injuring 2,383. This far exceeded the calamity of ...

Rishi Sunak, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, delivered another steroidal burst of government spending. As the man writing fat checks at a time of disruption and uncertainty, Sunak has become so popular that it’s now obligatory to include the words “potential future prime minister” whenever his name is mentioned. He enjoys a 92% approval rating among Conservative Party members, which ...

Does President Donald Trump want to deport everyone who is not an American citizen? Sometimes it seems that way. His administration recently announced that it may send home international students at colleges and universities that choose online learning in the fall, in an effort to reduce the risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic. The announcement is cruel. It’s also stupid. ...

Time will be the next frontier in India’s digital battlefield; dollars will follow the hours consumers spend online. India has left a void in their day by banning 59 Chinese apps after a border dispute with its northern neighbor led to violent clashes. The video-sharing platform TikTok, which became a craze in towns and villages as a medium of expression, ...

Facebook Inc still doesn’t get it. A widely anticipated meeting between the social media giant and the civil rights groups behind the recent Facebook ad boycott — including the Anti-Defamation League, NAACP and Color of Change — did not go well. The New York Times reported CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg met for about an hour on a ...

For most people, a vaccine against the coronavirus can’t come soon enough, as it will be the only tolerable way to achieve herd immunity. So it’s encouraging that more than 100 drug candidates in 12 countries are in development, and eight are already entering clinical trials. To accelerate the process, some people are heroically volunteering to expose themselves to infection. ...

The English are obsessed with owning property but Boris Johnson’s government worries that they’ve not been buying nearly enough houses lately. As elsewhere, the UK housing market was put into suspended animation for several weeks to help contain Covid-19. Now Johnson’s finance minister, Rishi Sunak, apparently plans to put a rocket under the market by temporarily scrapping transaction taxes — ...