Opinion

Volvo’s announcement that it intends to starts phasing out purely gasoline- and diesel-powered cars starting in 2019 in favor of electrified models appears strategically timed to coincide with the start of production of Tesla’s Model 3, which should be hitting the streets by the end of this month. It’s scary news for Tesla: The market for electric cars is largely ...

For this Independence Day, at a moment when the tone of our political life would probably shame our Founders, here are snapshots of some brave American soldiers and civilians I met inside Syria last week who should make us all proud. Let’s start with a bearded sergeant major from Oklahoma. He’s driving an armored SUV down a dusty road toward ...

Executives at South Korea’s carmakers recently blamed strained Chinese relations for a massive sales shortfall in the world’s largest auto market. Foreign affairs only partly explains the story. Just as Bejing’s boycott over Seoul’s plan to host a US missile defense system hurt Korean makeup and toy brands, it also hit the auto industry: in the first half of the ...

With the ouster of Travis Kalanick, its founder and chief executive, Uber has vowed to mend an array of broken and frayed relationships. It can start with cities. It can focus on the sharing of some basic information. Its competitors, including Lyft, can join in this project, too. App-based ride services have changed the urban world, often for the good. ...

By 2050, more than one-quarter of the world’s population will live in Africa — up from about one-sixth today. Even if these projections are slightly off, that fact should serve as a call to action for a continent whose long-term promise is equaled by wide-ranging perils. The numbers come from the latest United Nations report on population trends, which projects ...

When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile this week — what its boy tyrant called a ‘gift to the American bastards’ — the response from the Trump administration was fairly conventional. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson correctly called it an escalation. He announced America’s intention to bring the matter before the UN Security Council. And he assured, “We will ...

A taxi company that owns no cars. A media titan that creates no content. A retailer with no stores. A couple of years ago, this was the view of Uber, Facebook and Amazon: growing powerhouses even though they consisted of little more than software engineers and data centers (and, in Amazon’s case, a back room with no storefront). Perhaps the ...

As technology changes, a country’s industrial mix changes. A century and a half ago, most Americans — and indeed, most human beings — worked on farms. Today almost nobody does. Nowadays, a substantial number of Americans work in retail, ringing up purchases, stocking shelves or helping customers find what they need. But in a decade or two, it’s anyone’s guess ...

The IS’s headquarters in Tabqa at the western gateway to Raqqah has been crushed like a sand castle by American bombs. At a dam complex on the Euphrates River where IS until May was torturing prisoners, all that’s left of the extremists are militant slogans scrawled on the wall and a pile of trash. It’s far too soon to say ...

If you bought $100 worth of the BSE 500 Index instead of MSCI India at the beginning of the year, you would have made about $5.50 extra. If you’re after exposure to the next China, then why not pocket a bit of extra cash? The MSCI lags because it still favours India’s information services companies and snubs the financial firms ...