Opinion

On April 6, Israeli army Sargent Elchai Taharlev, 20, was standing by a bus stop in the West Bank, when a car driven by a Palestinian purposely veered off the road and killed him. Two months later, Hadas Malka, 23, was standing guard with the border police outside the Old City of Jerusalem when she was killed by three Palestinians …

It’s vacation time in France, and the fleets of buses plying the nation’s highways suggest President Emmanuel Macron’s earliest effort to shake up the economy is catching on. Cheaper and less glamorous than France’s celebrated high-speed trains, buses are hauling ever more travellers. That’s after Macron, then the economy minister, pushed through a law two years ago allowing passenger buses …

In 2003, when a number of former intelligence professionals formed a group to protest the way intelligence was bent to accuse Iraq of producing weapons of mass destruction, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a sympathetic column quoting the group’s members. In 2017, you won’t read about this same group’s latest campaign in the big US newspapers. The Veteran …

Generals, the old saying goes, always fight the last war. A similar (though less pithy) principle is that politicians always propose solutions to the last decade’s problems. In the US, there are two main areas where we see this principle at work. The first is immigration—net illegal immigration stopped a decade ago, but President Donald Trump and his supporters are …

Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the world, unite!”— not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially …

Facts are facts, but their interpretation is often subject to preconceived notions that can be easily misunderstood. Households have been net sellers of stocks for some time, which is a fact. The interpretation of this fact, however, can go badly awry. The dangerous implicit assumption is that households are selling because they want to reduce their exposure to equities. That …

Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier deserves congratulations for resigning from a White House business council to protest President Donald Trump’s shameful response to last weekend’s white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. So do two other CEOs who followed his example. More corporate leaders should do the same. It’s in their interest to do so. Corporate leaders lend credibility to a …

China is the largest market for General Motors, but there is no GM China. Instead, there is SAIC-GM, a joint venture between China’s largest state-owned auto company and GM.All auto companies operating in China have a similar partner, such as SAIC-Volkswagen, GAC-Toyota and Changan-Ford. And the partners are typically state-owned companies, and their names come first. Doing business in China …

China’s budget and trade scolds should pause for reflection. Debt racked up by China’s government, companies and households will likely balloon to almost 300 percent of gross domestic product by early next decade, the International Monetary Fund projected in its annual review of the country’s economy. Big, for sure, and a risk to global financial stability. But anything less would …

The rally this year in US stocks has been defined by its lack of breadth. Put another way, without the eye-popping returns of a few high-flying technology stocks, the performance of the market would look very different—and not in a good way. So it’s more than a bit concerning when the so-called smart money starts to pull away from this …