Opinion

Parmy Olson You have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. In the face of criticism about the radical strategic shift he has chosen for Facebook, he is stubbornly focused on turning it into a metaverse company. Other tech billionaires may lash out at dissent, but Zuckerberg remains stoic, tuning out the noise to give earnest interviews and presentations about his ...

The US health-care system needs more nurses. Nursing schools aren’t producing enough graduates, young workers are quitting, and older ones are retiring early. Throughout the pandemic, widespread shortages reduced the quality of care and even cost lives. To bolster the workforce and better prepare for the next crisis, the US must invest in its domestic pipeline and clear hurdles for ...

Rachel Sanderson If Giorgia Meloni had expected a straightforward passage to becoming Italy’s first woman prime minister, she hadn’t counted on her coalition ally Silvio Berlusconi’s enduring desire to control. Italy’s three-time premier started undermining her far-right government even before its ministers were named. But Meloni has something to learn from Berlusconi too. He provides a cautionary tale for all ...

Andy Mukherjee In May, the South China Morning Post published a letter from a reader who wrote to say that Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund should be abolished as “it has failed on multiple levels from the perspective of ordinary citizens.” Replace it with a universal basic income, he suggested. Hong Kong was recently graded C+ in the Mercer CFA ...

Matthew A. Winkler Gavin Newsom is as familiar as anyone with the media narrative of earthquakes, persistent wildfires, droughts, homelessness and companies fleeing California to Texas for a tax- and regulation-free lifestyle. This is nothing new. California’s governor recalls a 1994 Time Magazine cover story citing “a string of disasters rocks the state to the core, forcing Californians to ponder ...

James Stavridis This week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization started a round of exercises of its nuclear capabilities in Western Europe, centered in Belgium and the UK. This comes at a particularly fraught moment in Nato-Russian relations, to say the least, given President Vladimir Putin’s frequent rattling of the nuclear saber over the past six months. Russia is “not bluffing” ...

Faye Flam Researchers at Boston University sparked alarming headlines this week by creating a more lethal version of the omicron Covid variant. At the heart of the uproar is the fact that the researchers didn’t have any obligation to inform anyone beyond an internal review board about what they were doing. Some officials at the National Institutes of Health only ...

Every Chinese leader stamps their mark on the country they rule for five, 10, (or 15) years. Xi Jinping’s brand is indelible, but the technology companies which have powered China’s economic rise over the past decade will be searching for clues on how to navigate his third term. When Xi took power in March 2013, Tencent Holdings Ltd. stood at ...

  Unrealistic as it was technically, the idea of a pan-Asian currency always had some political support: Since 2005, the Japanese have published the exchange value of something called the Asian Monetary Unit, a precursor to what would one day become the region’s equivalent of the euro. The debt crisis in southern Europe — and the threat it posed to ...

  At the end of this month, the US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in two closely watched cases on affirmative action in higher education. They’re widely expected to overturn the 1978 case that allowed racial diversity to become an organizing principle for college admissions. Like Roe v. Wade, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke is ...