Opinion

Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites. While many people today live under the murk of light pollution, we can at least still travel to a glittering night sky in the mountains, the desert, or at sea. But if communications ...

It’s become fashionable of late in central Europe to accuse French President Emmanuel Macron of being a “neo-Gaullist” who touts the cause of “European sovereignty” as a cover for expanding French power, cozying up to Russia and keeping the US at bay. Worse, he’s undiplomatic about it all, arrogant, “Jupiterian.” This interpretation may be understandable for the Poles and Balts. ...

I’m not selling,” says the chairman of one of Japan’s biggest technology companies. Let me grab some popcorn and a ringside seat for what I hope will be a hotly contested bidding war. Japan’s tech sector is ripe for further mergers and acquisitions. But the rarity of hostile takeovers means most deals feel like they’ve been hammered out over a ...

Most economists and market participants don’t usually spend much time looking at Swedish monetary policy. Today should be different given the decision by the Riksbank — the country’s central bank and the world’s oldest — to part ways with its peers in advanced countries by raising interest rates because of worries about the collateral damage and unintended consequences of an ...

From a political standpoint, 2019 will be remembered as the year President Donald Trump got impeached. From an economic standpoint, however, the year has turned out about as well as he could have hoped for. After being effectively flat since the middle of 2018, the stock market has risen to record highs over the last several months. That performance is ...

Protests have broken out across India, a few of them violent, against a new law that fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from three majority- Muslim countries. In the northeastern state of Assam, where migration has long been a major political issue, four protesters were killed when security forces opened fire. In both the capital of Delhi and the town of ...

There’s a school of thought that says the dominant business model for tech startups isn’t B2B (business-to-business) or D2C (direct-to-consumer). It’s really V2C: venture-capital-to-consumer. In other words, piles of venture capital are being directed into the pockets of consumers — often tech-savvy millennials — in the form of discounted services provided by startups prioritizing growth over profit. The fact that ...

I now have low expectations when Mark Zuckerberg writes a manifesto, gives a speech, grants media interviews or fields questions from lawmakers. In these settings, and particularly on questions about how the world should or does work, Facebook Inc.’s chief executive officer can seem over-rehearsed, scarily superficial, cravenly political, evasive — or all of the above. But in less-scripted moments, ...

When it comes to retirement, France is like other countries, only more so: Everything about its system is untenable. It’s untenable that it has 42 separate public pension schemes — one for train drivers, another for opera singers, and so on. It’s untenable that the French think they have a God-given right to retire at 62 or even earlier. And ...

After a landslide victory in the UK general election, Boris Johnson has many difficult choices ahead — not least on Brexit. One imminent personnel decision, however, will reveal a lot about whether Britain still wants to play in the big league globally. Johnson’s government is about to pick a new governor for the Bank of England, as Mark Carney’s term ...