Opinion

At one level, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s decision to fire the department’s inspector general tells us nothing we didn’t already know. Even before Pompeo enabled the smearing and sidelining of US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch last year, he had made it clear that he would tolerate political attacks and even retaliation against members of the US foreign service. ...

The fast pace at which various laboratories are working on vaccines against Covid-19 carries both promise and peril. On May 18, Moderna Therapeutics Inc announced the first reported data from human trials, and they are positive. That’s good news, and it arrived sooner than expected. But the parts of the project that lie ahead will be harder to accomplish with ...

Rival soccer teams in Germany’s Bundesliga clash in an empty stadium, Italians meet for socially distant restaurant dining and tourists are visiting the Acropolis again. Things are reopening in Europe. Not so much in Britain. Here, the lifting of restrictions has been a source of bitter controversy, confusion and nervousness. Britons may be pouring into parks and hitting the roads ...

The Federal Reserve’s stated mandate is to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long term interest rates.” The first part is obviously a disaster right now, with more than 36 million Americans filing initial jobless claims in the past eight weeks, bringing US unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The last objective ...

It’s been an uncomfortably swift rise to the top of the coronavirus tables for President Vladimir Putin. From only a handful of Covid-19 cases in early March, Russia now has more than 290,000 of them and a rate of new infections that puts it second only to the US — a country with more than twice as many people. Few ...

Today, no government sees defending liberal trade as its first order of business. More urgent matters demand attention. But trade is no sideshow. If governments fail to shape a stronger trade system, and defend it to their voters, a reversal of globalisation is possible. That could end up causing more long-term economic damage than any other consequence of the coronavirus ...

Each virus has its unique pattern of spread, and scientists are starting to get a handle on how the novel coronavirus behaves. This understanding is making it possible to rank the risks of different activities from high to low to trivial. The most informative studies show how the disease is spreading in the real world — a big advance over ...

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to bring about many deep, long-lasting changes in US society and the economy. It’s difficult to predict what most of those will be. Unfortunately, one likely possibility is that college towns will suffer. For the past few decades, college towns have been a pillar of the economy. Universities draw in lots of educated workers, in ...

Residents of nursing homes or similar facilities account for at least one-quarter of US deaths from Covid-19. The true figure might be a lot higher. The coronavirus has spread to nearly 7,000 nursing homes in all 50 states. In at least seven — Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia — more than half of all Covid-19 ...

For the hotel chef who can’t afford his nine prescriptions, losing a job could be a matter of life and death. Even among the employed, fear of what’s around the corner is almost as paralysing. It’s enough to put the minor inconveniences of working from home — the unrealistic homeschooling curricula, the crick in your lower back, the maddeningly slow ...