Opinion

A plastic water bottle, a Snickers wrapper and a container of detergent are dropped into a recycling bin. Are they hazardous waste? They could be, according to a Norwegian government proposal, which marks the latest effort by activists and government officials to tackle the growing tide of plastics threatening the ocean. The proposal has good intentions: It aims to mitigate ...

Private equity firms appear to be signaling “Last one out is a rotten egg.” If those powerhouse investment firms smell something fishy, other investors should take notice. Holding periods — the amount of time between when a buyout firm makes an acquisition until it flips the company back into the public markets or to another buyer — have been drifting ...

No one knows when the 737 Max will return to the skies, least of all Boeing Co. The planemaker gave its first financial update since the Max was grounded by regulators across the globe in March after two fatal crashes. Boeing is suspending its guidance until a future date “due to the uncertainty of the timing and conditions surrounding return ...

An unsettling specter haunts the world economy: a future of ubiquitous robots that destroy millions of jobs. Sometimes this is called “artificial intelligence”; sometimes it isn’t. Either way, it threatens the social stability of the United States and other advanced countries, which depend on most people working most of the time. Well, don’t believe it, says a massive new report. ...

It took Tesla Inc. longer than usual to release its first-quarter results on April 24. One can see why. As the sales numbers foreshadowed (again, with an unusual delay), revenue dropped more than a third versus the prior quarter, although it was still up a third over a year earlier. Automotive gross profit margin came in at just under 20 ...

The “Sasda” dream is over. Almost a year since British grocery giant J Sainsbury Plc clinched a clever 7.3 billion pound ($9.4 billion) deal to buy Walmart Inc.’s Asda, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has blocked the transaction. Both companies have agreed to walk away. The CMA is wrong to take such a harsh line, which went even further ...

President Donald Trump’s Venezuela gambit has come up short. Three months after the US recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as president and rolled out far-reaching energy sanctions, Nicolas Maduro remains entrenched atop his militarised regime. Disappointed, the US administration has begun lashing out. Yet its new moves will divide the dozens of countries that have joined an anti-Maduro coalition, making ...

African industrialisation has to be among the most important things happening in the world right now. The vast continent, with more than 1.2 billion people, is home to an increasing fraction of the human beings who are still mired in extreme poverty: By 2030, the World Bank projects that almost all the people in extreme poverty will live in sub-Saharan ...

Now that J Sainsbury Plc’s 7.3 billion pound ($9.4 billion) purchase of Walmart’s Asda has gone out with the spoiled salad, the UK listed supermarket must show it has a good shot at going it alone. Mike Coupe, CEO of Sainsbury, says he is confident in the group’s strategy. Investors clearly don’t share that view – at one point on ...

Remember this moment. Early 2019 may have showed us the ceiling for the business of selling car rides at the tap of a smartphone. In an updated financial document for its coming initial public offering, Uber Technologies Inc. disclosed that the total value of rides on its service was between $11.3 billion and $11.45 billion in the first quarter of ...