Opinion

No, Vladimir Putin has not suddenly become a man of peace. His recent overture in Ukraine should be seen for what it is — an effort to further his own interests — and treated as such. After the Russian president called for bringing United Nations peacekeepers into the Ukraine conflict, Germany’s foreign minister said he was “very glad” about the ...

India has a way of confounding expectations. Analysts agreed that, months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ill-fated decision to withdraw 86% of currency from circulation overnight, growth would bounce back. Economists polled by Bloomberg expected growth in the April to June quarter to be 6.5%; other estimates were even higher. So when the government’s official statisticians released the real number ...

It was inevitable that the fallout from violent protests in Virginia organized by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups would extend to the virtual world of the web. The internet is our modern commons. But the past few days have shown how fast we can glide down the slippery slope to web censorship. Facebook and Twitter were perfectly within their rights, ...

Elon Musk is worried about governments, specifically the Russian one, competing for artificial intelligence superiority and sparking World War III. That shocking statement was made all the more shocking by the low expectations the world seems to have for Russia, which US Senator John McCain dismissed just a few years ago as a “gas station masquerading as a country.” Recent ...

As the US-led coalition accelerates its campaign to destroy the IS’s remaining strongholds in Syria, the Trump administration faces a big decision about the future: Does it want to keep some US troops inside the country to help stabilize Syria after the extremists are defeated, or does it want to pack up and come home? The dilemma is eerily like ...

Of all the setbacks during World War II, the one that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could never really get over was the fall of Singapore. Seventy-five years later, Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s new CEO, shouldn’t even want to contemplate the costs of surrendering the city’s ride-hailing market—for that might mean the beginning of the end of Uber Technologies Inc.’s global ...

President Emmanuel Macron’s new government has unveiled its plan to overhaul France’s notoriously rigid labor market. It includes useful measures that should help to boost employment, and it’s a good first step. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t resolve some deeper-rooted problems, in particular the unduly sharp divide between workers on temporary and permanent contracts — the underlying cause of France’s so-called ...

There are, as is often noted, no good options for dealing with North Korea. All the more reason for the US not to make the few it does have even worse. That’s what President Donald Trump is doing by linking the security threat posed by North Korea with his trade agenda. Irked by China’s failure to help the US rein ...

The US has been roiled by debates over immigration. Japan has the opposite problem—not enough debate. Immigration is happening, and no one is talking about it or preparing to deal with it. Americans tend to use Japan as an example of a country that doesn’t take in immigrants. For example, my Bloomberg View colleague Justin Fox recently wrote that “politicians ...

How can we fight back against the fake news infecting our information feeds and political systems? New research suggests that education and filtering technology might not be enough: The very nature of social media networks could be making us peculiarly vulnerable. The intentional spreading of false stories has been credited with swaying such monumental events as last year’s Brexit vote ...