Opinion

  By most measures, the US economy is doing well — but not when it comes to inflation. Consumer prices rose 8.5% in the year to March. Wages are rising too, though not fast enough to keep up. That means financial stress for many families, especially those on fixed incomes or with meager savings. With midterm elections approaching, President Joe ...

One of the biggest questions of the Ukraine war concerns tensions half a world away: What lessons will China draw from the Russian invasion? Western observers hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine will convince China to go slow — that it will discourage President Xi Jinping from undertaking an invasion of Taiwan. Yet there’s a real ...

Their bruising battle for control of a bankrupt Indian retailer isn’t over yet, and two of the world’s richest men are already heading for a second round in their contest — this time on the cricket field. Mukesh Ambani, the petrochemicals and telecommunications tycoon, is expected to vie for broadcast and streaming rights of the Indian Premier League via his ...

  One problem with Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter Inc for about $40 billion is that he does not have $40 billion. Of course he is very rich — the richest person in the world, worth $260 billion by Bloomberg’s estimate — but most of that money is tied up in the stock of Tesla Inc, SpaceX, the Boring ...

  Two world wars had raged within three decades, costing over 100 million lives, when history’s most destructive weapon was deployed in August 1945. The horrific prospect of nuclear-fuelled, mutually assured destruction has kept superpowers in check since then, and a cyber-equivalent may be just what’s needed as global hostilities turn digital. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has been ...

Remember Azovstal. Some phrase like that could soon take the part of “Remember the Alamo” Azovstal is a giant steel plant in Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces are pounding into submission and, in effect, extinction. In it, a couple of thousand Ukrainian troops, sheltering a smaller number of civilians, are holding out under constant Russian bombing ...

In 2015, German entrepreneur Michael Cassau was in need of some gadgets for an apartment he was planning to occupy for a few months. Buying seemed wasteful, considering the cost of new devices and the environmental impact associated with manufacturing new ones. But renting, an obvious option, simply wasn’t available. So Cassau founded Grover Group, a gadget rental company based ...

  It’s an idea that won’t lie down. US-led sanctions against Russia and the threat that they could ensnare China will prompt Beijing to elevate the international role of the yuan, potentially marking a turning point for the global financial order. Dream on. The structural impediments to the Chinese currency challenging the dollar’s dominance are so great that it’s surprising ...

  We want our governments to be creative in solving intractable problems. But the new British policy of sending asylum seekers 4,000 miles away to Rwanda doesn’t count as the “innovative” answer to people-smuggling that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel claim. Patel has faced constant criticism over her failure to tackle the problem of migrants crossing ...

The sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship Moskva was the first destruction of a major warship in combat since the Falklands war 40 years ago, when both the UK and Argentina lost large surface ships in the cold waters of the South Atlantic. For the Russians, you would have to go back to World War II to find a ...